


The Cafe, At The End Of The World

by headlesshorsepossum



Category: Original Work
Genre: (...I swear), Angst with a Happy Ending, Betrayal, Binding Safely Is Important Even In The Apocalypse, Car Accidents, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Male Character, Whump, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 42,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23436619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/headlesshorsepossum/pseuds/headlesshorsepossum
Summary: The zombie apocalypse arrives, and three gay idiots are trying to get away from the epicenter. How exactly are they going to navigate the hoards of undead, or their developing feelings for each other, when none of them are being honest about who they are, and why they are so desperate to get to some secret medical facility upstate?
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	1. The Cafe (Part One)

**Author's Note:**

> Find this, along with extras, on my tumblr: thewhumperinwhite.tumblr.com
> 
> I didn't necessarily mean to end this on such a cliffhanger, but no matter how brutally I pared it down it was getting long for my typical tumblr post, so the opening is in two parts.
> 
> TW for: domestic abuse, slight/referenced/brief homophobia, lightly implied transphobia, vomiting, gore.

It’s a quarter past midnight, and Sol has not had a cigarette break in four hours, and he hates everyone in the Bayview Cafe right now. It’s called the fucking Bayview, what the fuck are people doing here when it’s too dark to see the View of the Bay?

He’s down to two occupied tables, a total of three people standing between him and the ability to go home and add tonight’s tips to his top surgery fund. Two are new, at a corner table where Proux must’ve seated them while Sol was in the kitchen—thirty minutes before closing, the bastard—and the third is an old man in a moldy green overcoat, who has asked Sol for “more time” three times now, so Sol is fairly confident he’s looking for a dry seat to wait out the rain coming down in buckets outside, not overpriced small-plate bullshit.

Well, Proux is busy with Shawn in the kitchen, who came in smelling like weed (again) and is arguing with surprising eloquence that he should be allowed to smell like whatever he wants if he doesn’t interact with customers; so Sol is deciding to give the old man a few more minutes of warmth and dryness anyway when he hears a sudden dramatic shattering sound and turns to see a full glass of water tumble off the newly occupied corner table and explode onto the floor.

He stomps over toward the broken glass, and he’s almost grateful for the excuse until the patron seated with his back to him turns at the sound of his approach and fixes him with a stare so cold Sol freezes to the spot for a second. The patron already facing Sol’s direction smiles, maybe apologetically, but his older companion’s glare is so hostile that Sol almost can’t see anything else.

Sol feels a drop of cold sweat make a run down his spine. His binder’s on, and he’s been reliably passing for months, but old habit fills his brain with danger signals immediately. He makes himself keep walking, telling himself some rich old person doesn’t need an excuse to hate anyone who witnessed such visible clumsiness. 

The other person— the one who isn’t glaring, is already halfway out of his seat by the time Sol gets to the table, reaching for the broken glass with his bare, rich fingers, and Sol knocks his hand out of the way none-too-gently before he can cut himself and get Sol fired. The guy backs off immediately, easing awkwardly back into his chair.

“Sorry about this,” the faceless non-glarer says in a soft voice. The Glaring Man noticeably says nothing; Sol keeps his eyes on the glass so he doesn’t cut his own fingers, either. “Just an accident,” he goes on, as if Sol would have assumed it was anything else.

“No problem at all,” Sol says automatically, and then, when he stands, he makes eye contact with the non-glarer, and feels his face heat up immediately. The second person at the table is a young man, no older than Sol is himself, twenty-one or twenty-two, and he’s very, very handsome. He’s frowning at Sol with big sky-blue eyes, looking embarrassed. Sol looks away from him immediately, momentarily forgetting that his other option is the older man’s zero-degree stare. He can see immediately that they’re related, probably father and son; the old man’s eyes are the same light blue, though they’re still squinted in haughty resentment. Sol clears his throat, irrationally terrified that his voice will squeak, which it hasn’t done in months. “Another— uh— water for you, sir?” he says huskily. The man nods curtly, and Sol scurries away, relieved.

He’s about to flee back to the safety of the kitchen, but actually, he’s holding a grade-A excuse to make his conversation with the old man as short as possible, so he stops there on the way, shards of broken glass cradled in his apron.

Sol isn’t sure how the man can see him coming, buried so deep in his hood, but he curls up tighter in his filthy coat, so he must.

“Sir,” Sol says, keeping his voice gruff, “this isn’t a park bench. If you’re not gonna order anything, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

After a long, awkward pause, a voice like dead leaves chasing each other in circles wafts up from under the old man’s hood. Sol, leaning in to catch the words, is hit by a wave of the old man’s smell— much different than the normal unwashed-body smell he expects— and jerks back up straight.

“…just some coffee, then, boy,” the old man wheezes, and pulls himself in tighter like he’s trying to disappear.

The cheapest coffee on their menu is eight dollars, which is more than Sol would have had to spare when he was in a position to be loitering in cafes to be out of the rain. It’s kind of more than he can spare at the moment, if this guy runs out on him. “We don’t serve plain coffee here, sir,” he says, guilt making his voice harsher than he means it to be. “You’ll have to order something specific.”

The man cringes again, drawing in on himself like he wants to disappear. Then a single damp hand slides out of his coat sleeve and deposits a twenty dollar bill on the table.

“Cream and sugar,” he says in that same wispy voice, and Sol stares at him, then shrugs. He could tell the man five places he could sleep tonight for that much— or buy himself a decent coat, for that matter— but it’s none of his business what some stranger does with his money.

“Be right back with that, sir,” he says instead, and tramps off to dispose of this glass responsibly and pour the old man an overpriced coffee.

Entirely by accident, Sol catches the tail end of Glaring Man’s growl on his way back out to deliver the water and stutters to a stop, not sure whether it’s safe to interrupt or not.

“—like such a goddamn child,” he’s saying, his voice fast and sharp and utterly poisonous, “we would not be having this conversation, boy.” In defense of Sol’s eavesdropping, he was actually starting to raise his voice a little by the end there.

His son is more careful about keeping his voice low, and thus harder for Sol to accidentally listen to. In response to whatever the young man says, Glaring Man curls his lip and leans forward, and hisses, “I will consider your feelings when you give me feelings worth considering,” and Sol feels his own face twitch a bit in response.

“I have your water here, sir,” he says loudly, causing both patrons to look at him, and he quails a bit under the intensity old man’s renewed glare, and might actually drop the glass he’s holding if the young man didn’t suddenly swipe it from Sol’s relaxing fingers and knock back a huge sip, setting it down loudly on the table.

“Thank you,” the young man says in a very warm voice, and then he drops Sol an unmistakably lewd wink.

Sol stares at the young man with his mouth open, which means he sees every movement involved in the full-force backhanded slap his father gives him.

The young man stumbles half-way out of his seat with the force of the blow. Sol takes an involuntary step back, barely avoiding the spray as the water he’s just brought launches into the air and spills down the side of the white table-cloth. The Glaring Man gets jerkily to his feet.

“I will see you again when you’re done being a fucking embarrassment,” he says, not looking at his son, and then he shrugs into his expensive-looking coat, gives Sol one last glare, and leaves the cafe.  
Catahn stares at the door for a few seconds after it has slammed shut. When he turns back, the young man hasn’t moved from the position the slap pushed him into, halfway out of his chair, one hand tight on the edge of the table, head bowed.

Sol has no idea what to do. He takes a hesitant step closer. “Uh— you— you okay?”

The young man doesn’t answer. After a second Sol realizes with a spike of panic that his shoulders are shaking, and he’s reaching up a narrow hand to cover his face under the curtain of chin-length blond hair that’s fallen in front of his eyes. Sol is about to turn tail and run because no thank you, he’s dealt with way too much bullshit tonight to add emotions to the list, when the boy leans over the table, clutching his stomach, and Sol realizes he is laughing.

“Uh,” Sol says, only barely less alarmed.

“I’m sorry,” the blond wheezes, wiping at his long-lashed eyes. “Sorry, I’m sorry, you must think I’m— damn.” Laughing even harder, the boy shakes his head and rights the water glass his father knocked over when he slapped him. “You must think I’m out of my mind,” he finishes, struggling to get ahold of himself.

Sol one hundred percent does. “Uh— I mean, ‘course not, I— um— “

“I’m sorry,” the blond says, looking up at Sol, a little more composed but still grinning, and Sol freezes up again. His eyes are incredibly blue, and they’re still lit up with laughter. His cheek is turning red where his father’s knuckles bit into it, and now that Sol’s getting a good look at him, he sees there’s more than that— a thin scar through his left eyebrow, and a new break in his nose that looks like it’s almost finished healing, just a slight crook in the bridge and very faint dark circles under his bright eyes. “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable,” the blond boy says, shaking his head, still pinning Sol with his bright, laughter-filled, slightly-bewildered gaze. “I’m not really sure why I did that.”

Sol is determined not to say “uh” again. “Neither am I,” he says instead, and winces at hearing his own tone, which is openly hostile. “Whatever.” That’s worse, actually. Sol wants to hide his face, flexes his hand against the mug of coffee he is somehow still holding instead. “Look, do you— want anything? More water, or. Like. Whatever?” He has to stop himself from making a face at how fucking stupid he sounds.

The boy doesn’t laugh at him; at least not with his mouth. His eyes do get suspiciously sparkly again, though. “Coffee, maybe,” he says, resting his chin on his hand and looking directly at Sol and nothing else. For a blond he has surprisingly thick, dark eyelashes, and he’s still smiling, his blue eyes crinkling slightly. Then he winces as though just remembering something unpleasant. “No, wait, I take that back. My meal ticket just left.” He gestures vaguely toward the door, and raises his other hand to his cheek without seeming to realize he’s doing it. The redness is already darkening; it’s going to bruise. “I guess I should get out of your hair, huh? I’m sorry.”

It’s at least the fourth time he’s said he’s sorry. And while Sol isn’t gonna pretend he has any idea what’s going on here, not really, it does seem a lot like this kid’s dad slapped him hard enough to bruise for winking at another guy. Which is none of his business, he tells himself furiously, at the same time as he slams the coffee he’s still holding down on the table.  
The blond blinks down at it, then up at Sol, blinking his long brown lashes. “I’m— sorry, I can’t afford— “

“It’s on the fucking house,” Sol snarls, and turns away to pour another free coffee, because he couldn’t reasonably pay for some rich kid’s americano and then kick some homeless guy out in the rain, which means he was gonna pay fucking sixteen dollars for the priviledge of being a gullible gay dumbass.

The first coffee splattered halfway up the sleeve of his uniform shirt, and Proux yells at him the second he enters the kitchen until he puts his horrible scratchy wool blazer on to cover the stain.

The old man is still sitting in front of the window, buried deep in his big moldy coat. Sol runs a hand through his hair— it’s been a fucking long night.

“Sorry about the wait,” he says to the old man when he sets the coffee down in front of him, and then he sighs and adds, “Keep your money, this one’s on me.”

The old man doesn’t move.

“Uh— sir?” Sol says, and then the old man leans over the coffee cup and vomits a mouthful of blood half into the cup and half across the table.

The smell of decay his Sol in the face and he stumbles back half a step. “J— Jesus Christ!”

The old man lurches suddenly toward Sol and almost topples right out of his chair, his breath coming in one long ragged wheeze, and Sol reaches forward instinctively so he doesn’t fall.

The old man puts his hands flat on the table. Sol realizes that he’s shaking. “I’m alright,” the old man says in a small, unsteady voice. “I’m alright. There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Sol almost can’t hear over the alarm bells ringing in his head. He loosens his grip on the old man’s shoulder. “Uh— yeah,” he says, trying to make his voice soothing. “I’m sure you’re fine. Listen, I’m gonna just go get my boss real fast and I’m sure he’ll— “

When he starts to back away, the old man’s hand shoots out and tightens around Sol’s bicep tightly enough that Sol lets out a sound not far from a squeak. The smell coming off the old man’s hand almost makes Sol gag, and he can see it leaving some kind of slime on the thick wool of his sleeve.

Slowly, like his head is only delicately attached to his shoulders and might fall off if moved too suddenly, the old man turns his head to look up at Sol for the first time, and at the sight of his face all the air rushes out of Sol’s lungs. He can’t move a muscle.

“Please,” the old man says, and blood sprays from his lips as he speaks and splatters onto Sol’s shirt. “Please. You’ve got to help me.”


	2. The Cafe (Part Two)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Please,” the old man says, and blood sprays from his lips as he speaks and splatters onto Sol’s shirt. “Please. You’ve got to help me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: minor character death, blood/gore, mild body horror (only on the level of, like, a zombie movie), Eye Horror, very oblique references to child abuse (just in case). Also, overuse of epithets, and I swear to got this will be the last section where they don’t know each other’s names.

The old man’s skin is the dull white of a body that’s spent a week underwater. His eyes are more bloodshot that Sol’s ever seen, yellow and red everywhere they should be white. Sol thinks, unconsciously, of his father’s first few attempts at taxidermy, before he’d really gotten it right; after a week, if his father hadn’t gotten all the wet parts out, they would start to smell the way this moving breathing man smells now.

Sol’s ears are ringing so loud that he almost can’t understand what the old man is saying. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

The old man’s hand tightens on his arm, and his grip is so much stronger than it should be— 

Out of nowhere, an arm in a white sleeve passes in front of Sol’s face and a pale hand with long thin fingers wraps around the old man’s wrist, clearly being careful not to touch the man’s worm-eaten hand.

“Sir,” the blonde boy from the corner table says in a steady, soothing voice, “We’re going to get you the help you need, but we can’t do anything unless you let go. Okay?”

The blonde pushes gently on the old man’s arm, but if anything, the hand on Sol’s bicep gets a little tighter.

“I don’t think it’s working,” Sol croaks. His mouth feels very dry.

“Be quiet and don’t make any sudden movements,” the blonde says, his voice quiet but still smooth and soothing. Sol darts a glance at him and sees a drop of sweat make its way down the side of the blonde’s face. The blonde gives Sol a strained smile.

The old man stares at the blonde’s hand on his wrist. His own hand still hasn’t loosened on Sol’s bicep. Sol is beginning to lose feeling in his fingers.

“Not you,” the old man says in such a low voice that Sol isn’t sure he’s heard right. The old man’s black and bloodshot eyes widen, and as Sol watches a blood vessel pops in the left one, filling it up with red. Sol gags and blinks his own eye shut in sympathy.

“Jesus,” Sol mutters, and says to the blonde without looking away, “Go get Proux.”

The old man is shaking again. Sol can feel the tremors all the way up into his shoulders, and while he can’t be a hundred percent sure he thinks the old man might be making a high pitched whine low in his throat that scrapes against Sol’s back teeth like nails on a chalkboard. 

The blonde, meanwhile, is looking at Sol like he’s out of his mind. “What? No.”

The old man’s hand tightens even more, how is it doing that, and Sol gives a vague grunt of pain and readjusts his footing. “Fuck off, man!”

A drop of blood wells up in the corner of the old man’s left eye. Sol feels bile rising in his throat but can’t look away.

Like he’s speaking to a particularly dull child, the blonde says shakily, “I can’t just leave you here with— “

“I said,” the old man repeats in a whisper that is suddenly a shout, “NOT—” He raises the hand that is not wrapped around Sol’s arm. “–YOU.”

The old man’s arm connects with the blonde’s collarbone with a sharp crack, and the boy stumbles back, blue eyes flying wide, and goes to his knees, mouth open but no sound finding its way out.

Bowing his head, the old man stands, shoving Sol a few steps backward. Sol’s ass connects with the glass-top table behind him and he is suddenly very aware that there is no more space to back up.

“You’ve got to help me,” the man says again, but with a great deal less conviction than before. He sounds kind of— confused.

Sol swallows hard. There has to be a right thing to say, something that will make this not be happening. There has to be. What is it?

“Sir,” Sol says, wincing. He can almost feel his arm bruising through the wool of his jacket. “What do you want?”

The old man looks at Sol. His left eye is nothing but a mess of blood, now.

There’s a moment of airless silence. Sol wonders if the blonde has had the presence of mind to yell for help and he just can’t hear it.

Then the old man leaps for his throat.

“Jesus shit!” Sol throws his arm up in front of his face, and the old man’s teeth sink into the wool instead of his skin. Sol topples backwards into the table, feeling the glass connect with the back of his head and shatter under him, against his arm and shoulders. Someone is screaming, and he doesn’t realize it’s him until after he’s hit the floor in a pile of linen and broken glass.

The old man is on top of him, shaking his head back and forth like a dog worrying a bone, his dull teeth unable to pierce the sleeve of Sol’s blazer. His hood flipped back when he lunged and Sol can see more of his worm-eaten, skeletal frame and Jesus, he looks like he’s been dead a month— 

The old man’s free hand clamps down on Sol’s wrist and squeezes. Almost immediately there’s a sharp pop and Sol’s vision goes entirely dark for a second.

He’d screamed again, except he can’t breathe.

Afterward Sol isn’t sure that he ever actually lost consciousness but either way he’s disoriented enough that his only thought when he hears a voice that is unmistakably Proux’s squawk something he doesn’t understand is Jesus Christ what could that fucker want now?

There’s a sudden pain against the side of his face, sharp enough to bring him most of the way back to reality. He’s on the floor surrounded by broken glass. 

The maitre d’, who is positively shrieking, is tugging at the old man’s shoulder, and the old man, still intent on tearing Sol’s sleeve, is ignoring him.

Proux, who, Sol realizes in a dizzily detached way, is sobbing, fumbles around on the floor beside him, comes up with a thick water glass, and smashes it over the old man’s head.

Glass shards spray Sol in the face, several tiny needles of pain, and so he barely sees the old man rock once with the blow and then, with no change in expression, turn and leap full force for Proux’s face.

Sol forces in a lungful of air and scrambles to get up onto his hands and knees, shredding his palms on the glass shards. Proux is screaming and he can’t tell where anyone else is and he can’t see right and there is a strange, fuzzy pounding in his ears, but he is able to give the old man one weak shove before he sees the old man take Proux’s trachea between his teeth and tear.

Proux’s scream cuts off with a gurgle and the old man turns to face Sol again, his one eye wide and blank, and the world goes silent again.

The old man is gathering to spring when someone grabs Sol by the shirt collar and yanks him to his feet.

Someone is yelling at him in a language he doesn’t know, but Proux’s eyes are wide and glassy with tears, and for a second before they go empty and the desperate airless rise and fall of his chest stops, Proux’s hand twitches in Sol’s direction and his lips move and Sol’s single dizzy thought as he’s dragged backwards toward the kitchen is I didn’t want this not this I never— 

“Will you move your fucking feet?” the blonde boy is shouting at him.

Sol hears another voice he recognizes but can’t identify make a desperate squawk and then he’s half-thrown against the wall and the door slams shut behind him. Sol sinks down against the wall, feeling fried.

Shawn is standing in the kitchen, and his spotless uniform suddenly looks very strange to Sol. “What the fuck is going on out there?” he half-shouts.

“I don’t know,” the blonde boy says, his voice steady. He’s standing kind of weirdly, curled in around his chest, and one of his hands hovers unsteadily around his shirt collar as though determined to protect it. “Is there anyone else here?”

“Just you guys and Proux as far as I— “

“Proux’s dead,” Sol says, though his voice comes out so slurred he doesn’t know if Shawn will understand him. His head feels funny. “He’s dead. Proux’s dead.”

Shawn stares at him, and then to Sol’s dull surprise, he snorts, though he sounds kind of desperate. “No he’s not,” he says. He looks at the blonde boy for confirmation, and the blonde looked at the floor for a second before getting carefully to his knees in front of Sol. “He’s not!”

The blonde ignores him and pushes Sol’s hair away from the side of his face, then winces. “I thought so. You’ve got a concussion, man.” Sol feels the boy’s fingers ghost over his ear, and they come away bloody. He looks up at Shawn. “Have you called the police?”

“What? Y-yeah, I did—but—”

“Aren’t you listening to me?” Sol yells, and ignores the way the ringing in his ears gets so much louder afterward. “He’s dead! Proux’s dead! Don’t you get—“

He doesn’t get to finish, though, because that’s when the kitchen door explodes.

The blonde, kneeling in front of it, puts an arm up to shield his face from the splinters but isn’t quite fast enough to avoid a chunk of wood the size of Sol’s fist that strikes his temple like a bullet and knocks him over just fast enough that the old man travels right over his head and slams into Shawn at chest height, sending him down to the tile of the kitchen floor in a tangle of limbs.

The old man tears at Shawn’s shoulder with his teeth and Shawn makes a sound Sol doesn’t have a word for.

Sol isn’t sure how he’s gotten to his feet exactly but once he’s there he takes hold of the hood of the old man’s coat and pulls as hard as he can.

The old man finally seems to notice and turn to look at Sol at roughly the same time the hood tears and Sol tumbles back against the wall. His vision blurs out for a second that he does not have.

Sol catches a flash of dull teeth and thinks of that look on his father’s face and waits for the sick wet sound of the old man tearing into him.

There is a sharp clang instead.

Sol waits for his vision to clear.

The blonde boy is standing over him with a frying pan in his hand and so much blood on his shirt it’s hard to tell it was ever white. The old man, the side of his skull caved in like an overripe fruit, sags to the floor as if in slow motion.

Panting, the blonde turns to look at Sol, blood running down the side of his face from the cut in his temple. He’s shaking.

“Do you think,” he wheezes; closes his eyes, sways for a second, opens his eyes again. “D’you think that covers the cost of the coffee?”

Sol stares at him, his ears buzzing.

“Fuck you,” he slurs.

The blonde takes a stumbling step toward Shawn. 

Somebody swears loudly from the front room and the blond freezes like a popsicle and raises the pan again, eyes wide.

Then the voice clears its throat and shouts, “This is the police! If there’s anyone back there, stay right where you are! We’re coming to get you!”

The blonde’s eyes roll back in his head, and he faints.


	3. Hospital/Squad Car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which names are fucking FINALLY exchanged; Sol comes out the same way I do 100% of the time; hands are held angrily; I Don’t Know About You Guys But I’m Sure Shawn Is Fine And Safe To Be In A Car With Right Now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: cops; implied past suicide attempt; referenced familial abuse; implied/referenced homophobia; self-harm.
> 
> Also, this is long, but I chose not to split it into two parts in the interest of getting back to The Action next time. Also please note that this is not a police procedural and I care about Gay H/C, not about How To Police Work, so please forgive the no doubt glaring inaccuracies.

Sol rests his pounding head in the hand not attached to his dislocated wrist, squeezes his eyes shut, and tries to shake the residual claustrophobia still crouched hot in the center of his chest.

He doesnt look up at the sound of Shawn being steered into the chair next to him. Shawn winces audibly as the motion must pull at his stitches.

“Thank you for waiting, boys,” the nurse says. She sounds uncertain in a way Sol generally doesn’t prefer in his medical professionals. “A, um. An officer will be here to talk to you shortly, I guess?”

Sol grunts vaguely, too tired to protest, and he can hear the polite smile in the blonde boys voice when he says in a too-bright voice, “Thank you. We don’t mind waiting.”

The nurse scampers. There’s a moment of what passes for awkward silence in a crowded hospital hallway. Then someone pokes Sol gently in the shoulder.

“Hey,” the blonde says in his velvety voice. “How do you feel, man?”

Sol lowers his hand and raises his head to stare at the blonde, who does at least have the grace to look sheepish. He spreads his heavily bandaged hands. “How do I look?”

The blonde fidgets, moving carefully to avoid straining his broken ribs, and picks awkwardly at the bandage above his eye with the arm that is not currently in a sling. At some point someone lent him a plain white t-shirt to replace his bloody button-down, but there hasn’t been time or space for showers, apparently— is the hospital normally so busy at five in the morning on a rainy Friday?— and his hair is still plastered up at odd angles and kind of red in places. Though it’s hard to tell whose blood is whose, at this point. On Sol’s other side Shawn is poking half-heartedly at his bandaged shoulder.

“Sorry, stupid question,” the blond agrees ruefully. “I meant, how’s your head?”

Sol glares at the floor. “It’s fine. Just a little knock. Not like I’ve never had one of those before.” In a much lower voice he adds, “I fucking hate MRIs.”

To Sol’s surprise, the blond’s face immediately softens. “Yeah,” he says, and he sounds almost— fond. Then he holds out his hand. “I’m Kent, by the way. Kenton Graves.”

Sol stares down at the boy’s hand, and thinks about telling him to fuck off. He takes Kent Graves’s hand in his bandaged one instead. “Sol Michaelis.”

Kent Graves blinks. “That’s, uh, quite the name.”

Sol raises an eyebrow. “Thanks,” he says flatly. “I picked it myself.”

Kent stares at him. Sol waits. “Oh,” Kent says, then, “Oh! I’m— sorry, I didn’t mean to make fun.”

Sol squints, lets Kent squirm while he weighs that response. It’s not a bad one, and he doesn’t ruin it by tacking on a bunch of excuses, just looks at Sol, embarrassed but not defensive. After a moment Sol waves his hand dismissively. “Whatever.”

Kent’s face relaxes into a smile immediately. It’s kind of distracting. Then he leans forward to offer his hand to Shawn, too, paling a little as the movement must make his ribs and fractured clavicle shift painfully. Sol winces a little in sympathy.

“Uh— Shawn Dugan,” Shawn says distractedly. Speaking of pale, Shawn is currently the color of string cheese. 

“Nice to meet you, Shawn,” Kent says politely. “You feeling okay?”

It seems to take a second for Shawn to focus on Kent’s face, but when he manages it he smiles, looking a little… scared. “Yeah, I don’t feel so hot.” He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck. “A little. Uh. Freaked, I guess.”

Kent’s smile fades, and he massages a careful hand over his collarbone. “Yeah,” he agrees, settling back into his chair. “Me too.”

Sol glares down at his splinted wrist and says nothing. They tried to put him under general anaesthetic to reset it and he had to fight tooth and nail to keep them from putting him under. Goddamn bastards.

Somebody wearing heels clicks down the long hallway in their direction, and Sol raises his head too fast, his vision blurring out for a second. “Fuck,” he mutters, raising a hand to his pounding head.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, boys,” the person attached to the noisy heels says in a brisk, businesslike voice. As Sol blinks she slowly resolves herself into a pretty girl in a police uniform, her long black hair bound back into a tight braid. “How are we feeling tonight?”

Sol hasn’t really had a chance to look in a mirror since before he was shoved in an ambulance fucking five hours ago, but if he looks anywhere near as wrecked as Shawn or Kent, the answer to that question should be pretty fucking obvious. Nobody answers the officer, anyway. She smirks at them, hands on her hips.

“Yeah, I thought so. Well, we’ve got the okay to take you three down to the station so you can tell us exactly what happened, kids. Do any of you have anybody you’d like to inform of your whereabouts and condition before we get this show on the road?” She fishes a flip-phone out of the pocket of her not-very-flattering uniform trousers. “You can use this if you didn’t get a chance to grab your phone before we left the café. I’ve been told you left in kind of a hurry.”

There’s a moment of silence as all three of them stare at the phone. Shawn, with a nervous glance towards Sol and Kent, who haven’t moved, reaches a shaky hand out for the phone.

“Uh,” he croaks, and then he lurches forward slightly and raises a hand to his head. The officer has to take a quick step forward and grab hold of his uninjured shoulder to keep him from falling right out of his chair. He pauses for a second, and then looks up at her. Sol winces at the look on his face. Shawn is almost thirty, but he looks like a scared kid.

“I-I’d like to call my mom,” he croaks, and he’s really a worrying color under his embarrassed flush. “I mean, if that’s okay.”

The officer’s face softens at Shawn’s obvious distress, and she passes him the phone. “Yeah, of course it is.” Planting her hands back on her hips, she looks from Sol to Kent, one dark eyebrows raised. “Who’s next? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Shawn gets very shakily to his feet and wanders off a little down the hallway to call his mother in peace, using the wall for support. Sol looks expectantly over at Kent, who fidgets and then looks back at Sol for a second, and then down at the floor.

“There isn’t anyone I want to call,” he says, looking up at the officer.

Sol looks at him. There’s a muscle jumping slightly in his jaw. Interesting. Sol shrugs. “Me neither, I guess.”

The officer looks from Sol to Kent, frowning. Sol can’t really tell if she looks annoyed or— god— sympathetic. He looks away to keep from rolling his eyes. “You sure? Last call.”

Sol and Kent exchange a look almost without meaning to, and then they both look at the floor. Sol thinks of the look on Kent’s father’s face as he left the cafe. It isn’t an entirely unfamiliar one. “Yeah,” he mumbles finally. “I think we’re both sure, lady.”

There’s a long, awkward moment when the officer and the two boys listen to Shawn murmur shaky assurances into the phone and resolutely do not look at each other. Then Shawn hangs up the phone with a click and stumbles back over to hold it out toward the officer. “Thanks,” he croaks, swaying a little.

“Uh— no problem.” The officer looks from one pale face to the other, looking a little out of her depth. Then she sighs and squares her shoulders. “Okay. The sooner we get down to the station, the quicker you kids can go home. Are, uh— “ She falters a little. “Are you guys all okay to walk?”

Annoyed, Sol swings himself up to his feet, overbalances, and has to be stopped from falling by a hand on his shoulder he realizes to his mortification belongs to Kent. He wills himself not to blush and feels his cheeks and ears reddening anyway, and shrugs away. “Yes, we can walk,” he snaps, shaking his head to clear it.

The officer doesn’t quite laugh at him, but it looks like a struggle to hold it in. “Okay, sure, tough guy. Squad car’s this way.” She strides away, her non-concussed head held high, and the noisy clicking of her heeled boots drills straight into Sol’s skull, sounding much louder in his bruised brain than it probably is.

In his irritation he shoves Kent’s offer of a steadying hand away a little harder than he means to, and Kent winces away like he thinks Sol might hit him. Sol immediately feels guilty, but there’s no way to take it back, so he just stomps after the police lady, and Kent falls back to make sure Shawn doesn’t fall over, instead.

“You can call me Officer Santos, by the way,” she tells Sol over her shoulder. “I think that’s a couple steps up from ‘lady,’ don’t you?”

Sol grumbles at her.

It’s fucking freezing outside, but the fresh air feels good against Sol’s face anyway— the MRI machine had been so damn closed in, and he’d started sweating all over, and while he doesn’t feel clean and he aches all over, at least the icy wind snaps a little bit of clarity back into his poor overheated brain. 

Then he sees the squad car, and cringes a little. “You’re— not gonna let one of us sit up front, are you? he asks Officer Santos halfheartedly.

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to,” she says cheerfully. “My backup’s already in the driver’s seat. Back seat’s not really meant for three people, but you kids’ll fit just fine if you get a little cozy, don’t worry about it.”

She grins at him, and then practically skips over to the passenger’s side. Sol grinds his teeth.

Sol turns back to glare at Shawn, who has a hand clamped over his mouth, and then at Kent, who seems to be half holding him up, although his face is very pale. Shawn’s shoulder is resting against Kent’s collarbone, and Sol can’t keep in a sympathetic wince before he schools his features back into a glare. “You’re sitting in the middle,” he snaps at Kent. “If anybody gets puked on, it ain’t gonna be me.” He slides into the driver’s side before either of them can protest.

It takes some doing to actually get Shawn in the car, and by the time everybody is seated and buckled in, Sol and Kent are pressed together from shoulder to hip. His head starting to spin a little, Sol notes that Kent has nice thighs— slender, but with more muscle definition than he saw from far away. Sol wonders dizzily if he works out.

Shawn, who seems to be sweating king of a lot, rests his head against the window and goes immediately to sleep. Sol kind of envies him.

Officer Santos’s “backup” turns out to be a twenty-something man with shaggy hair and a carefully cultivated smattering of stubble across his chin. Sol sees that the driver very briefly reaches for Officer Santos’s hand once she’s slid into her seat, but elects not to comment.

Kent looks around at the cramped interior of of the squad car with academic interest, and Sol rolls his eyes at him. “What, you’ve never seen the back of a police car?”

That earns him a quizzical look not just from Kent but from Officer Santos, too, and he immediately regrets saying it.

“Uh— no, never,” Kent says, but thankfully doesn’t ask any of the dozen questions written all over his dumb pretty bruised-up face. Instead he reaches forward and taps against the plexiglass divider between the back seat and the front, like the one in a taxi. The little sliding glass door stands open. “What’s this for?”

“It’s bulletproof, in case you guys turn out to be violent killers,” Officer Santos says brightly.

“Soundproof, too,” the driver pipes up. “For when we have to take noisy drunks back to the station.

Kent laughs, and the sound is awkward and strained. “Oh.”

Officer Santos elbows the driver in the ribs. “Come on, backup. Let’s get these kids back to the station so we can all go to bed.”

He laughs, and as soon as he starts the car, Officer Santos dives for the radio knob. Screaming metal guitars fill the cab, but the noise dills into Sol’s temples with far too much force for him to enjoy it even a little. He throws his hands over his ears. “Jesus!”

“I agree,” the driver says, grinning, and reaches for the radio himself.

If anything, the candy-coated pop he selects is even worse, especially because he grins widely and starts singing along. Sol’s head hurts entirely too much for him to judge whether or not the driver is any good. “Christ, will you shut up?”

When Officer Santos yanks the radio back to the metal station, Sol gives up and reaches forward around Kent to slam the sliding door in the divider closed, and although the sound doesn’t entirely cut off, it at least dies down to a bearable drone. Sinking back into his seat, Sol heaves a relieved sigh, mostly for the sake of his own pounding headache, but also because even in his sleep Shawn looks fucking exhausted, sweat visible on his forehead even from Sol’s seat.

Sol rests his head against the pleasantly freezing glass of his own window and basks in the silence for a second. In fact, he makes it a respectable forty seconds before he can’t resist shooting Kent a sideways glance.

The blond is playing with the bandage above his eye, and looking deeply uncomfortable. Sol frowns at him.

“You know,” Sol says abruptly, and doesn’t stop when Kent winces at the sound of his voice, “I don’t fucking get you, kid. There’s no way they’d take you to the station if you’d called him and had him pick you up. You’ve gotta be fucking loaded, right?”

Kent’s blue eyes slide over to Sol’s face, and then he looks down at his hands, smiling unhappily. “I’m not actually sure I am ‘loaded’ anymore. He may have actually disinherited me this time.”

“What, for— “ Winking at me? Sol doesn’t say. “What’d you do?”

Kent’s answering huff of laughter is pathetic enough that Sol almost doesn’t hear it over the hum of the car around them and the faint pounding of bass from the front seat. “Uh, I dunno. Something stupid, I guess,” he says softly, and twists his hands together.

For a second, his sleeve shifts up and Sol catches a fast glimpse of a single, deep scar on his left wrist, but he tugs it back down so fast Sol can’t be entirely sure.

There’s a very awkward silence. Sol wonders if Kent knows he’s seen it. Probably not.

“It’s like a twenty minute ride to the station, man,” Sol says, when he doesn’t think he can take it anymore. “Elaborate, dammit.”

Kent winces a little and shifts in his seat, poking at the thin scar on his forehead in a way that seems unconscious. “Uh, not that it’s any of your business, but I— broke up with my girlfriend.”

Sol blinks, and waits for him to go on. He doesn’t.

“What the fuck’s that got to do with you dad?” he asks blankly, and Kent laughs and looks away, really scrubbing at his scar now in a way that looks like it should be painful.

“Uh, well, I say girlfriend but I guess the real word is fiance,” he says, fidgeting, and that pulls Sol right up short again.

“Huh? How old are you, man?”

Kent laughs again, looking everywhere but at Sol’s face. “I’ll be twenty this May,” he mumbles. “Sophie and I grew up together, and I think my father kind of decided I’d marry her when we were, like, nine. Her dad’s a business associate.”

“He what? What year is this?” Sol says blankly. “Who the hell does that?”

“My father does, I guess,” Kent says, and the way he says “father” reminds Sol of things he doesn’t really want to think about. Damn, he’s really going to town on that scar of his. Sol’s surprised he hasn’t just torn it right back open.

“So why’d you break up with her, then?” Sol says, because goddammit that’s enough with the awkward pauses. “Because you’re gay?”

Kent actually splutters at that one, and actually looks Sol in the eye for the first time in the whole damn car ride. He also colors prettily. Sol feels weirdly pleased with himself. “Uh,” Kent says, and then looks away, flushing. “Um… no, actually. Or not… entirely, anyway.” Oh, god, now he’s digging his nails against his scar. “I’m not really sure why I did it, exactly. I think maybe I just wanted— I wanted— “

Sol one hundred person does not mean to dart his hand up and wrap it around Kent’s and after he’s done it his brain catches up with him and they both freeze and sit there stock still for at least ten seconds, Sol’s bandaged fingers all tangled up with Kent’s.

Finally Sol drops their twined-together hands to the tiny space on the seat between his right leg and Kent’s left one, even though half of his brain is screaming at him to let go of the guy’s hand oh god.  
“Fucking quit that before you tear your fucking face open, okay? Forget it, I’m sorry I asked.”

Kent is staring down at his hand, which is still trapped beneath Sol’s, and wow, he is red all the way down to his broken collarbone.

Sol stares down at their hands too, and is feeling his own face start to flush when he’s saved by Shawn apparently coughing up one of his lungs. They both jump like they’ve been shot, and Kent snatches his band back before turning to touch Shawn’s shoulder with admirable care.

“Hey, you alright?” Kent asks him, and Shawn, shaking with chest-deep coughs, shakes his head.

“Oh man,” he says faintly. “Dude. I feel like absolute shit right now.”


	4. No More Squad Car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which shit blows up, both literally and metaphorically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: Cop Fires Gun At Unarmed Civilian; car accident; coughing up gross shit; fair warning going forward that café zombies are Gross.

Biting his lip, Kent rests the back of his hand against Shawn’s forehead and cries out indignantly. “God, you’re burning up! Why’d they let you leave the hospital if you had a fever?”  
Shawn shakes his head. Leaning around Kent to frown at Shawn, Sol sees that his eyes are glassy and he’s sweating. “I dunno, man, I didn’t feel half this bad at the hospital,” he croaks. His voice is mostly air.

“Well you look like shit now,” Sol says, and glances up at Kent. “Think they’ll let us go back if we tell ‘em he’s dying?”

Shawn pales, and Kent shoots Sol a glare. “Hey, come on, don’t even joke about that,” he snaps, and then turns to wipe sweat off Shawn’s forehead with his sleeve, fussing like a mother hen. “You’re gonna be alright, okay? We’ll get you checked out as soon as we get there. I’m sure they won’t push you if you aren’t up to— “

Shawn cuts off with a harsh cough that ends in a choking sound, and Kent pulls his hand away from his forehead, hovering with his hand near Shawn’s face like he isn’t sure what to do with it. Shawn claps both of his own hands over his mouth and bends double, squeezing his eyes shut. Then he freezes, and his eyes fly wide.

Trembling, Shawn lowers his hands. A string of blood-clotted saliva stretches between his lip and his fingers until it reaches its limit and breaks. Phlegm flecked thickly with red drips down over his chin.  
Dark eyes very wide, Shawn looks down at his hands and then up at Kent. “I-I— “ His eyes are glassy with tears, now. “I’m okay,” he says in a clotted, bubbly voice.

All the air rushes out of Sol’s lungs.

“We’ve gotta stop this fucking car,” Sol says, but without any air his words are lost under the roar of the engine. Kent is already tugging the glass door in the divider back open with badly shaking hands.

“Turn the car around!” Kent shouts at the driver, his voice shrill with panic. “We’ve gotta go back to the hospital!”

“Are you out of your mind?” Sol yells. “Stop the fucking car!”

Kent rounds on him. “What’s wrong with you? Shawn needs a doctor!”

Sol doesn’t bother responding to that, hammering on the glass divider. “Hey! Are you listening? Pull over!”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Shawn press his bloody hands over his ears. “You’re being too loud,” he mumbles in a shaky voice.

Finally turning the radio down, the driver frowns at Kent over his shoulder for a second, then turns back to keep his eyes on the road. “What the hell’s going on back there?” he half-shouts. Shawn curls in on himself, shaking his head.

“Too loud,” he mutters. “Shut up!”

Kent yells “Turn around!” at the same moment that Sol howls “Pull the fuck over!” and the driver raises a hand to cut them off.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kane press his bloody hands over his ears. “You’re being too loud,” he mumbled in a shaky voice.

“Okay, slow the hell down!” he shouts over both of them. “And one of you tell me what the hell’s wrong with— “

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Shawn’s hand darts forward before anyone can make a move to stop him, wraps around the driver’s face, and slams his head back against the glass divider.

There’s a moment when everybody freezes, and then Officer Santos screams “shit!” and dives for the steering wheel just a second too late.

The car lurches up onto two wheels as she tries to get it around the next turn, and Sol’s head crashes into the window with enough forces that he loses a few seconds. He comes to unable to tell which way is up and with an awful screeching sound in the air loud enough to drown out anything except the panicked roaring of blood in his ears.

The car is airborne for either five seconds or several eternities. Sol can’t see anything because of the way his hair is floating weightlessly around his face.

Then gravity comes back as suddenly as if somebody has flipped a switch, and Sol’s head snaps back on his neck, sending pain rocketing all the way down his spine. The whole universe is upside down and his seatbelt is pressing into his chest and throat.

The radio is pounding out Kesha at a much lower volume than it was before. He guesses the driver one that one, then.

Suddenly unable to breathe, Sol scrambles for his seatbelt clasp, and dumps himself roughly onto the roof of the car when it comes undone more easily than he expected.

Sol doesn’t know how many times the car rolled, but it tore off the passenger side door, and while Kent, whose seatbelt seems to have already come undone, is sprawled across the roof of the car with his head resting against the glass divider and his eyes closed, Shawn is nowhere to be seen.

The divider is starred with a billion tiny cracks, and all Sol can see for sure is that the airbags are deployed and there is a lot of blood everywhere.

Shaking his head like a cat after a long fall, he grabs Kent by the shirt collar and crawls out through Shawn’s door, dragging Kent’s lanky body behind him. A tiny whine forces its way out of his throat when he puts weight on his wrist. He isn’t sure what yet, but something is definitely on fire.

Head spinning, Sol pulls Kent away from the car, across the asphalt, and looks around. The car has overturned in an almost empty parking lot, leaving a trail of window glass behind it. Squinting to force his eyes to focus, Sol sees something shiny that might be the torn-off car door closer to the street, and a dark lump, much closer to the car, that might be a body.

Poised to run, Sol stares at the lump, waiting for it to move.

It doesn’t.

Releasing a breath he didn’t know he was holding, Sol frowns down at Kent, who is also not moving, and pulls the blonde’s head into his lap. There is a new cut on his cheekbone from where it must have struck the divider, but Sol is fairly sure he’s breathing. Okay.

Sol presses the heels of his hands over his eyes and repeats the words don’t freak out in his head several times, as his breath picks up and his heart starts to hammer in his ears, which is why it comes as such a surprise when something large and heavy tackles him from the left, knocking Kent roughly out of the way and slamming Sol down against the pavement.

His eyes flying open, Sol stares at Shawn. Sol knows Shawn exactly well enough to know he played rugby in college and is still built like a linebacker. His big hands are wrapped around Sol’s wrists, drawing a gasp when he squeezes at the reset bones, and he plants his knees on either side of Sol’s waist.

Panting, Shawn stared down at him, his right eye and lips bloody. As Sol watches a drop of blood trembles at the corner of his eye before falling to splash against Sol’s cheek.

For a second, confusion flickers in Shawn’s eyes. Then he lunges, teeth aimed at Sol’s face.

Embarrassingly, it’s actually the gunshot that startles Sol into crying out, rather than the prospect of having his face ripped off.

Shawn’s weight lurches to the left, off of him, and he turns his head to see Officer Santos, standing beside the wreck, her gun in her hand and the driver sprawled unconscious at her feet.

Tears and fire in her eyes, she steps over the driver and fires again. Shawn’s body jolts on the asphalt next to Sol, and Sol has to throw an arm up to avoid a spray of blood across his face.

Officer Santos fires again. Squeezing his eyes shut, Sol turns away from the sight of what the shots are doing to what is left of Shawn’s face.

When the gun has been silent for thirty seconds, he starts to push himself into a sitting position with his good arm.

“Don’t you move.”

Sol freezes, forcing his eyes open. The gun is trained on the center of his chest, and although there are tears streaming down the Officer’s cheeks, her hands are steady.

“I want you to tell me exactly what the hell is going on,” she says in a low, dangerous voice.

Sol stared at her, willing his brain to start working again.

“You knew there was something wrong with him before he did a damn thing,” she says, and when he doesn’t answer, she fires again, and the bullet passes so close he can feel its heat against his cheek. “Start talking!”

His heart pounding in his ears, Sol stares at her, and sees the smoke rising from the engine behind her just in time to throw his arm over his face.

The wave of hot air from the engine exploding slams his head down onto the pavement, and the last thing he hears is someone shouting his name.


	5. Empty Bar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sol gets slightly taken care of, because it's what he deserves; Kent goes slightly overboard taking care of Sol, because he has slightly questionable coping mechanisms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: I honestly don’t think there are any triggers in here; there’s concussion symptoms and Two Different Manifestations Of Low Self Worth, but it’s. Not far from being straight fluff.

Even with his eyes closed, the random flickers of light assaulting his vision make Sol wince and turn to bury his face in his blankets.

For a long, blissful moment he’s warm on his shitty futon in his tiny apartment, holding on to his last few minutes of sleep before he has to get ready for work.

Then he remembers.

Sol sits up with a gasp, and immediately regrets it. 

“Hey, don’t,” a soft voice says, and a hand rests on his shoulder and gently pushes him back down. He lets it, raising a hand to his miserably pounding head. Someone brushes his hair carefully back out of his eyes. Their hand is very soft.

“You wanna try and sit up more slowly?” the voice says gently. “I found some ibuprofen if you want it. And you should probably drink some water, if you can.”

Ibuprofen sounds structurally necessary at the moment. Sol grunts an affirmative and scoots to sit up against the arm of the couch, his eyes still squeezed shut.

“Oh, sorry,” the voice says quickly, and the flickering light through Sol’s eyelids stops abruptly.

Sol cracks an eye open experimentally. The room is dim enough to be almost bearable. Sol blinks around at it, feeling like he has the world’s worst hangover. 

It’s a small room with plaster walls and industrial-style carpeting. Sol is stretched out on a stained yellow couch; there’s also a threadbare armchair, a very old television perched precariously on a rickety stand, a coffee table that looks like it was made in someone’s backyard, and a cramped kitchenette. The fluorescent ceiling lights are off, thank god, and the only dim light comes from a crooked floor lamp behind the TV. The coffee table is currently shoved up against the armchair to give Kent Graves room to kneel next to the couch and hand Sol a glass of water and two gelcaps. Sol gulps them down gratefully. 

“Do you feel nauseous?” Kent says when Sol has downed the entire glass.

Sol does, but no worse than when he’s hungover. “No,” he croaks, handing Kent back the glass.

“Okay. Are your ears ringing?”

Sol was into deathmetal in highschool, his ears are always ringing. “No. Where are we?”

Kent holds his hand up a foot away from Sol’s face. “Is your vision blurry at all? How many fingers am I holding up?”

Sol sits up straighter, looking around. “Is this, like… a breakroom? What time is it?”

Kent doesn’t acknowledge the question in any way. “How many fingers, Sol?”

Sol glares at him, and Kent raises one eyebrow, apparently willing to wait. Sol rolls his eyes. “Three fingers.”

“Thank you,” Kent says, lowering his hand, and sits back on his heels, looking around at the dingy room. “And— yeah, it is a break room, as far as I can tell.”

Sol pauses in the act of trying to sit upright to stare at Kent, alarmed. “You don’t know?”

Kent looks at the curtained windows, apparently a bit embarrassed. “Not— exactly? I mean, I know this is a bar. I didn’t get a good look at the sign.” He looks back at Sol, a bit sheepishly. “We’re less than   
two blocks from where the squad car crashed. You’re heavier than you look.”

Sol stares at him, mildly horrified. 

“Did you carry me here?” he blurts before he can stop himself.

Kent immediately looks guilt-stricken. “Yeah. I— I dragged you a little at the end. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“What the fuck did you do that for, genius?” Sol almost yells. Kent flinches like Sol’s hit him, but Sol can’t stop. “You don’t know me from shit!”

Kent uncoils from his whole-body wince slowly to stare at Sol in confusion. “You— what?”

“No wonder your nose is broken if you keep shoving it into other people’s business!” Sol snaps. Kent blinks at him, looking utterly flummoxed.

“Hold on,” Kent says. “Are you— sorry, you’re mad because you think I should have… what, left you there?”

“Uh, yeah!” Sol says furiously. “What kind of dumbass drags a stranger two blocks with a broken collarbone?” He swings his legs off the couch and sits up, gripping the upholstery and gritting his teeth   
through the resulting dizzy spell. “You did the same thing when the old man grabbed me at the cafe. I don’t need your help, asshole!”

Now that Sol is sitting up Kent, still kneeling on the floor, is looking up at him, wide-eyed. Then his face quirks up into a doofy sort of half-smile that Sol tells himself furiously is obnoxious, not cute. “So you would’ve left me there, huh? If you’d been in my position?”

“Hell yeah I would have!” Sol is not going to let Kent make him feel guilty, because he’s right, goddammit. “I don’t even fucking know you!”

“Interesting,” Kent says, and then he frowns and touches his chin in mock thoughtfulness. “You know, it’s funny. I swear I remember being in the car after it flipped, for just a second before I passed out. But when I woke up, I was definitely out on the pavement, out of range when it blew up.” He looks up at Sol, tilting his head in exaggerated confusion. “How do you think I got out of the car?” 

Oh. That. “That was different,” Sol says, flushing. 

Kent laughs, looking at him with that same weird, almost-fond smile he gave him at the hospital, when Sol said he hated MRIs. It was— infuriating. “Different how?” he says, and his voice is so warm that   
Sol shoots to his feet in order to stop looking at Kent’s face.

“Ghhgk,” Sol says eloquently, pressing a hand to his forehead while he waits for his vision to swim back into focus. “It just is, okay?” he says, and he opens the door next to the kitchenette.

“Oh,” Kent says as Sol steps out into the empty bar, scrambling to his feet behind him. “Um, I wouldn’t, uh— I wouldn’t try and go outside, yet.”

Sol catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the bar and forces himself to look away from the bruised wreck that is his face to frown at Kent. “What? Why not?”

Kent’s eyes dart out to the wide windows at the far end of the bar, leading out into the street. “Uh,” he says. He’s no longer smiling; Sol realizes with a growing chill that he looks afraid. “Well, I was watching the news while you were out,” Kent says. Sol looks around; the stools aren’t stacked up neatly on the bar and tables like he would expect. It actually looks like people may have left the bar in kind of a hurry. “It— it looks like the old man wasn’t the only one in the city.”

Sol stares at him, the ringing in his ears growing into a nervous buzz. “What? What do you mean?”

Kent shuts the door to the breakroom, cutting off the dim light and leaving the bar lit only by the streetlights outside. Sol looks out the window and sees that none of the business on the other side of the street have their signs lit. He feels suddenly very cold. “It sounds like— They think maybe it was some kind of. Attack or something? Like they were released at strategic points throughout the city. Some of them, uh— they got some of them right away, like… I did, with the old man, I guess. But it looks like whatever’s wrong with them spreads through fluid-to-fluid contact.” Kent laughs awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. “Like— like a zombie movie, you know?”

Sol is still staring at him. He watches a drop of sweat make its way down the side of Kent’s face. Kent’s ditched the sling they gave him at the hospital— possibly when he dragged Sol half a block— and his hand is hanging at his side. Sol can see it shaking.

“They’re telling people to stay inside,” Kent concludes, and waits for Sol’s reaction, fidgeting slightly.

Sol can’t stop staring. “My apartment’s on the other side of town.”

Kent nods. “Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah, I can’t, uh— I have to go upstate, actually.”

“You what?” Sol says. He’s beginning to think that everything Kent says is worse than the thing before. “Did you not just tell me that the city is filled with murderous zombies?” He gestures helplessly toward the windows with his bandaged hands. “Like, 28 Days Later-style fast zombies, too, not shambling Night Of The Living Dead ones?”

Kent nods. He looks unhappy, but he also looks completely certain. “Yeah. You should find somewhere to stay around here, if you can.” He shrugs. “But I gotta go upstate.”

And… listen. Sol does not know this boy. He has seen him get backhanded by his father, but that does not mean that he knows him, any more than pulling him out of a car wreck means he knows him. Or seeing him unconscious. This is the part where Sol says, okay, thanks for carrying me I guess, have fun feeding yourself to zombies, goodbye forever. Because he might be kind of attracted, but that doesn’t make him an idiot.

“What’s upstate?” Sol says, because apparently, yes it does.


	6. Used Car Lot (Part One)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent tries to be mobile with many broken bones. Sol, reluctantly, shares some backstory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: hints at Bad Dad Feelings, trauma-induced low self worth.

“You’re crazy,” Sol says conversationally. Just to make sure they’re clear on this.

The rain has turned into an icy, half-solid sleet, and he’s crouched in the alley beside the bar with his head bent against the cold, cutting mess, but he hears Kent sigh and senses rather than sees him roll his eyes.

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” Kent says, kind of prissily, as far as Sol’s concerned.

Sol tips his head, considering. “Sorry, I guess. Do you like ‘insane’ better?”

Kent sighs again, sounding put-upon. “I didn’t ask you to come with me.”

“I didn’t say I was,” Sol says, which is true; he hasn’t decided anything yet. “I’m just following you until you can get a ride, that’s all.” Speaking of which, it’s dark, and goddamn cold out here, and the sooner they get moving, the better. Sol readjusts his hands on his weapon and leans around the corner of the building to peer down the street. He doesn’t see anybody moving around, but it’s hard to be sure in all this damn rain.

“I didn’t ask you to do that, either,” Kent says, although of course he hasn’t exactly told Sol not to come, either. 

Sol turns back to raise an eyebrow at him. “You know how to hotwire a car?”

Kent fidgets, his hands shoved deep in his pockets— there was only one pair of gloves in the lost-and-found. “Of course not.”

“Then you should be grateful I’m doing this much. Now stop whining, before I change my mind.

Kent scowls. It might be more effective if he didn’t look so ridiculous. Despite Kent’s protest that it was stealing, Sol had effectively bullied him into looting the closet in the break room, and was pleased to find a perfectly functional, if slightly moth-eaten, black peacoat, and offered it to Kent on the grounds that he would slow the whole operation down by freezing to death in his torn hospital-issue tee. There was a pair of gloves, too, which Kent absolutely refused to take on the grounds that Sol “needed them more”— whatever _that_ means— and Sol pried one of the thick wooden legs off the shitty handmade coffee table. It isn’t exactly classy, but with a little effort he thinks it’ll make a serviceable club, and it feels good to have its weight in his good hand.

He suggested that Kent should take one too, obviously, and the blonde paled visibly under the bruises on his face.

“I don’t want one,” he said firmly, and from the look on his face you’d have thought Sol had suggested he stove his own grandmother’s head in with it.

“It’s for self defense, dumbass. Don’t you wanna be able to protect yourself?” Sol had said, annoyed, and Kent had actually wrinkled his broken nose at him.

“Not like that,” he said, and at this point Sol had more or less stopped arguing with him.

He’s still— kind of uncomfortable about it, though. A little.

When Kent leans around him to look down the street himself, Sol puts out a hand to stop him, and glares.

“Okay,” he says. “I just wanna make sure we’re clear, here.”

Kent sits back on his heels and waits for him to get to the point, crossing his arms. Sol’s frown deepens.

“I ain’t your babysitter. Okay? You do something stupid, I’m not gonna sweep dramatically to your rescue. I’m only going this far because I can’t think of a single better thing to do at the moment. Understand?”

For a second, Sol can’t really read the look on Kent’s face. Then he relaxes into a slightly confused smile, like Sol’s just explained something really obvious and Kent isn’t sure why he bothered. “Yeah. Got it. Are we just gonna sit here all night, or do you have a plan, Fearless Leader?”

Sol stares at him. Either Kent Graves is the biggest goddamn fool he’s ever met, or Sol just doesn’t understand him at all. Or both, he guesses.

It’s probably both.

“Okay,” Sol says, turning back to squint down the street. “I don’t see anybody movin’ around out there, do you?”

Kent shakes his head. “No, nothing. You, ah— you do have a plan, right?”

Sol shoots him an irritated look. “Of course I have a plan. There’s a place at the end of this street that sells used cars, so there should be plenty to choose from that are still in good shape. And,” he says, heading off Kent’s slightly guilty look before the blonde can whine about stealing, which sounds like the sort of thing he’d do, “they don’t really belong to anybody yet, so it’s not like we’re depriving anybody else of their transportation. Okay, your sainted highness?”

Kent rolls his eyes at that, but he does look somewhat mollified.

Squaring his shoulders— he’s not scared, but there’s nothing wrong with being a little nervous, that’s just basic survival instincts— Sol straightens and slips around the corner of the building, sticking close to the wall. If there is anybody out there, he wants to be sure he sees them before they see him.

“Okay,” he whispers over his shoulder. “I think it’s clear. Let’s go.” He scampers off down the street, ducking into alleys and storefronts to make his path less linear. He doesn’t look behind him to see if Kent is following; if he isn’t he can escort his goddamn self.

He’s focusing on running as quietly as possible, and scanning the street with alert suspicion when he stops— and listening to the splash of Kent’s footsteps behind him; the kid moves with a certain grace, but not a lot of quiet, apparently— when Kent takes the opportunity of one of his momentary stops to pant in a low voice against his ear, “C— Can I ask you a question— Sol?”

Sol pauses his scan of the street to look back over his shoulder. “What— now?” he asks, kind of incredulously. He can tell Kent is out of breath just by standing near him.

“I-if that’s alright,” Kent wheezes uncertainly. “I mean you don’t— have to answer if you don’t— want to. It’s just— “ He gasps, one hand hovering at the level of his chest, “J-just that my— ribs sort of hurt, and I was wondering if you might— ah— distract me?”

With a flash of hastily-repressed guilt, Sol realizes he hasn’t been thinking of Kent’s injuries at all, though god knows he hasn’t been permitted to forget about his own. Unwillingly, he thinks again about the fact that Kent carried him away from the wreck site. He glares straight ahead and wills the momentary shame-flush out of his cheeks. “I guess. What’s your question?”

“Why do you— know how to— hotwire cars?” Kent pants?

Sol winces. “Uh,” he says uncertainly. “Well.”

Sol leads another dash to the next storefront down to give himself time for internal debate. His immediate instinct is to snap that it’s none of Kent’s goddamn business, but he guesses that isn’t exactly— fair. Entirely. And. Well. Kent told him about his— fiancé. Or whatever.

Trying to relax, he focuses on the sound of his feet against the sidewalk, and the sound of Kent’s labored breathing from behind him. And it isn’t that much further until they reach the car lot and he’ll have an excuse to stop talking.

“I, uh, well— I taught myself, a long time ago. So I could, uh, steal my dad’s car.” He almost wishes he was more out of breath, but Sol’s been sure to keep himself in good shape, so he doesn’t even have that excuse. He licks his lips and shakes his dripping bangs out of his eyes, trying to think how to go on. 

“Oh,” Kent puffs, surprising him. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Sol risks a glance over his shoulder, and immediately trips over a bit of uneven sidewalk. “Whaddaya mean, ‘okay’?” 

Kent tries to shrug, winces. “Okay. I— get that. You don’t have to say anything more.”

Sol slows for a second, looking at Kent over his shoulder. He’s torn between annoyance at the very idea that Kent ‘gets’ anything about him— and the sneaking suspicion that he actually might.

He almost runs into the big metal sign outside of the car lot, in other words.


	7. Used Car Lot (Part Two)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent has a Bad Time. Sol tries very hard to stick to his principles. Pax plays the role God gave them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: noncon touching, slightly sexualized threats, knives, bad gun safety practices, guilt, mild flashbacks. Oh, also, one unintentional instance of misgendering. 
> 
> Also, if you're interested in any kind of Reasonable Posting Schedule instead of Random Batch Posting Whenever I Remember, check out my tumblr at thewhumperinwhite.tumblr.com.

Letting out an undignified “woof!” sort of sound, Sol reaches out to slam the hound that isn’t holding his makeshift bat into the sign to stop himself, forgetting that it’s the hand attached to his broken wrist. He doesn’t even have time to worry about whether anybody will hear the resulting clang because he’s too busy doubling up around his throbbing arm.

“Uh. You okay?” Kent says, struggling to keep a straight face.

Sol shoots him a dirty look. “I’m fine.” Then he leans around the sign to examine their options, feeling an excited grin creep onto his face in spite of himself. Just looking at all these shiny gently-used vehicles is sort of making his heart pound. If only he could get away with taking a bike, instead. That won’t do the two of them much good.

Not— that he’s decided he’s going with Kent. Because he hasn’t. And he probably isn’t. Almost definitely.

“Any preferences?” he says, turning to Kent, who seems a little taken aback by his enthusiasm.

“Uh— I think I’ll let you take this one,” Kent says, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender.

Maybe he does have some redeeming qualities, after all.

There are so many to choose from! Sol’s budget hasn’t left him room for even the shittiest of cars since he started living on his own, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about getting one. In fact, the amount of time he’s spent fantasizing about what kind of vehicle he’ll get when he can afford one is— kind of embarrassing. Now, granted, this is a _used_ car lot, so it isn’t like there’s anything really impressive here. And maybe it makes sense to shoot for something sort of inconspicuous, in such a hostile environment. Some sort of nondescript-colored pickup, then, maybe. He cranes his neck above the sea of cars, looking around for something that suits his needs— and maybe a few of his tastes, too, no harm in that.

Kent trails along behind him, curled in a little around his bruised and broken ribs, looking faintly miserable. With the self-justification that he’s doing the kid a favor anyway, Sol chooses to ignore this.

“Ooh!” he says, spotting a flash of red. “Here’s one!”

It’s lovely, Sol thinks, standing back to admire it. The color won’t really help them blend in, necessarily, but it’s big and sturdy enough that if anybody gives them any shit, they can just run the bastards over. Gleefully, Sol tugs the driver’s side door open and climbs up into the front seat, setting his makeshift bat on the passenger’s side.

With a relieved sigh, Kent half-collapses back against the next car over, laying a careful hand over his collarbone. Sol hadn’t really noticed the bruising there, before, but now that it’s soaked, his white t-shirt has gone sort of see-through, and his new contraband coat isn’t buttoned all the way shut. Not that Sol is looking. Necessarily.

Oh, whatever. Sol’s improved mood makes self-denial seem a little pointless. Kid has nice collarbones, bruised or not. Nothin’ wrong with observing that, he figures.

Sol turns back to the car, running both hands reverently down the steering wheel. He passed his driving test ages ago, and hasn’t had much opportunity to drive since then, excluding that one outstanding instance, which Sol can acknowledge went sort of— badly. Still, he’s fairly certain he remembers how to drive.

Pretty certain. Like, sixty, maybe fifty-five percent.

“Say,” he says, with a slightly awkward clearing of his throat, while he feels around under the steering wheel. “I know you don’t have a car, but you do know how to drive, right?”

Kent blinks up at him. He looks kind of dazed. Under his I-get-to-steal-a-car excitement, Sol feels a twinge of worry, which he hastily dismisses, because it isn’t his problem. “Uh— no,” Kent says, his eyes clearing a little as he focuses on Sol’s face. “It never really—seemed important to learn. My dad has, like, three drivers, so—”

Sol rolls his eyes. “Naturally,” he mutters. Then he crows delightedly as he finds the panel and snaps it off easily, leaning around the steering wheel to get a good look, successfully distracted.

He’s grateful Kent sort of made him take the gloves, now. Probably not smart to play around with electricity with his bare hands. Licking his lips, Sol trails his leather-covered fingers along the wires lead from the engine, and pulls them free of the ignition, enjoying the little snap.

Blinking down at the wires, Sol yanks the plastic caps off, exposing a little of each wire, then frowns, chewing at his lip thoughtfully. He misses his lip ring.

For a second, Sol thinks _fucking Proux and his fucking dress code_ and then he thinks of a bloody hand reaching toward him and desperate pleading fading out of glassy eyes and his hand goes numb around the wires.

It’s only for a few seconds, but in that time his vision is entirely filled with Proux, dying, and his own thought a few minutes before then

_(I swear to god I could about kill him sometimes)_

and that’s why he doesn’t hear Kent’s alarmed cry until it’s too late to do anything much except duck down into the cab.

“Hey!” a man’s voice crows from somewhere Sol can’t see. “There’s somebody else here, man!”

Keeping his head down, Sol scrambles for his makeshift weapon. Have they seen him? Shit!

“Aw, don’t run away!” the voice calls, and is joined by the laughter of at least two other people.

“Shitshitshit,” Sol whispers. He isn’t gonna get caught crouching here like a child avoiding punishment— but if they haven’t seen him, he isn’t gonna get himself killed just because he was too proud to be smart, either.

There’s a sudden, earsplitting _bang_. Sol, flattening himself against the driver’s seat, has time to think in a panicked, half-hysterical sort of way that this time yesterday he wasn’t so intimately familiar with what a gunshot sounds like.

“Don’t run _away_ , I said,” the man’s voice says, from a lot closer than it was before.

“I’m not,” Kent says softly, his voice admirably steady. He still sounds scared, though. Sol stares down at the fabric of the seat. Concentrates on the fabric of the seat and nothing else. “I’m not moving. Okay?”

“Aww, he’s scared,” a new voice says. It’s a little less cuttingly loud than the first one— through the half-closed car door, Sol can’t even tell if it belongs to a man or a woman. “It’s okay, little birdy. We won’t hurt you. Will we, Harri?”

The other man laughs once, a low, rumbling sound. Sol glances up. He can’t tell how far away they are anymore. Forcing his brain to slow the fuck down and run over the options left to him, he looks up at the half-closed door. It isn’t open very far— he left it open so he could hear Kent, and no further— but they’ll still see him hiding in here if they draw level with Kent. Fuck. Shit.

“‘Course not,” the first voice is saying. “C’mere, why don’t you?”

Sol freezes.

“I— “ Kent’s voice falters badly, but after a second to gather himself he sounds steady again. “I don’t have any problem with you. If this is— your lot, I’ll just—I’ll leave. Alright?”

“Maybe you got a little hearing problem,” the first voice says, friendly on the surface and dangerous underneath. _“C’mere,_ I said.”

His heart in his throat, Sol risks raising his head so he can just see Kent out the window.

Kent catches his eye. Sol freezes down to his marrow. All Kent has to do is acknowledge him, and they’ll both be stuck. Shit. _Shit!_

Then Kent looks away, and steps carefully in the direction of the entrance to the lot, using the car to support him.

Sol’s immediate rush of gratitude is followed with a flood of shame so heavy he thinks he might throw up. He claps a shaking hand over his mouth.

_“There_ you go,” the first voice says smugly. “Damn, you’re a lot prettier close up. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“It— It’s Kent. Listen, sir, I—"

There’s a crash, and Kent makes a strangled sound. Sol almost presses his hands over his ears, but doesn’t quite allow it.

He’s not Sol’s problem.

“Don’t you tell _me_ to listen, ya little shit. What are you doin’ here?”

“U-uh—I was looking for— _uh!”_ He cuts off with a sharp gasp. Sol swallows hard, and then he forces himself to crawl over to the passenger’s seat, picking up the bat again.

_If he’d taken a damn weapon, this wouldn’t have happened._

“Mm?” the man is saying curiously. “Ooh, you don’t like that much, do you?”

Kent makes a sound that is almost a scream.

“Ooh,” the second voice says, sounding interested. “That looks like a pretty nasty break, sunshine. Must hurt.”

Sol’s hand tightens convulsively on the bat. He tries to stop listening to what they’re saying and focus on the sound of their voices. They’re father away, now, and definitely on the driver’s side, somewhere. Sol forces his throbbing right hand to reach for the handle of the passenger’s side door. If he opens it slowly enough— 

Kent should have been keeping watch—he was the one not fixing the car.

You have to take care of yourself in this world, because nobody else is gonna do it for you. People who don’t understand that—

“So tell me, sweetheart— you here by yourself?”

“I— y-yes.”

Sol pushes the door open as quickly as he dares and slides out onto the pavement, bat clutched in one white-knuckled hand.

_People who don’t understand that—_

“Really? You sure?”

There’s plenty of time to get away now, while they’re distracted. It would be stupid to do anything else. Crouching low, Sol leans around the bed of the truck so he can see.

There are three of them— a woman in a long coat who’s leaning against a car with a gun in her hand, looking bored; a person with a long red ponytail and a bright green scarf pulled up over their face, and what looks like a fucking katana slung over their back, and a big burly man in a leather jacket. The man is pinning Kent against a car with his big, thickly-muscled arm across Kent’s chest.

While Sol watches, the big man leans into him, pressing what looks like his full weight against Kent’s broken collarbone. Kent’s cry turns into an awful, choking cough.

“God— _y-yes, I’m— I’m sure!”_

“Really?”

_“N-no one! I’m alone!”_

“Hmm.” The big man runs his free hand over his chin, like he’s considering whether to believe Kent or not.

_He isn’t Sol’s problem!_

The person wearing the sword laughs, although they sound slightly uncomfortable. “Come on, man. I think he’s telling the truth.”

The man turns to look at them, a dangerous light in his eyes, and the scarfed person holds their ground. Then the man shrugs, and pulls back.

Kent goes to his knees, gasping for breath.

Sol releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Okay. Okay. They’ll leave now. Everything is fine.

He’ll— he’ll still probably leave, though. He isn’t sure he can— imagine going back to Kent, now. Sol tries very hard not to acknowledge the sick guilt lying heavy in his guts.

“Hmm,” the big man says then. “You don’t look much like one of the crazies, sweetheart, but I think we should be sure, don’t you? How bout it, sweets–-are you bit?”

“Wh-what?” Kent says weakly, looking up at him like it’s hard to lift his head. “No.”

“Are you telling me the truth, now? We wouldn’t be doing our civic duty if we let one of the crazies go wandering around the city— would we?”

“Harri,” the sword-wearer says in a low voice.

Something metal flashes in the big man’s hand. Sol’s hands tighten on his bat before he can stop them.

The big man lays the knife against Kent’s cheek. Kent is still on his knees, and his eyes when he looks up at the man are cloudy, like he’s fighting to stay awake.

“I—" he croaks, raising a hand and stopping just short of trying to push the man’s hand away from his face. “I’m not bit, okay? Please, I just—"

“Shut up,” the man says conversationally. He pushes the knife a little harder against Kent’s cheek— the one without the scar. A few drops of blood slide down toward his jaw.

“Harrison,” the sword-wearer says, louder. “That’s enough, okay?”

“You shut up too,” the man says, a trace more irritation in his voice. “I’m the boss, and you do what I say, you got that, you freak?” He brings the knife a little further forward. Blood is flowing down the side of Kent’s face, now, getting watered down by the rain. Kent gasps, just slightly. “If I wanna kill this little shit, then I’m gonna, and there ain’t nothing you can—“

Sol swings the table leg.

There’s a really satisfying _crack_ as it connects with the back of the big man’s skull, and he goes down like a rock, flopping over sideways and leaving behind a very surprised Kent to stare up at Sol, his blue eyes very wide. Blood has started to soak into the collar of his shirt from the cut on his cheek.

“Oh, shit!” the sword-wearer squeaks, leaping back, and they draw their ridiculous weapon with a whisper of metal against leather.

Sol turns toward them, readjusting his grip on the bat. He’d been sort of hoping that it was some sort of cheap imitation blade, but it looks awfully—sharp for that. This—this is the stupidest goddamn thing he’s ever done.

Goddamn, though. Kent really looked _surprised._

No going back now, anyway. He readjusts his footing, raising the weapon like he’s standing at home plate. He’s high on more adrenaline than he’s ever felt, and it’s easy to ignore the pain shooting up from his bad wrist.

Both Sol and the sword-wearer jump pretty badly when the gun goes off again, punching a slightly smoking hole in the car window between them.

The sword-wearer, looking annoyed, flicks their eyes back toward the woman. Shit, Sol had forgotten all about her.

“Tell you what, love,” the sword-wearer says icily. “I won’t start this if you won’t.”

For a long moment the woman and the sword-wearer stare each other down. Sol, heart hammering in his ears, half-expects sparks to fly between them.

Then the woman shrugs and slides her pistol into a holster at her hip, and bends to scoop up the bloody lump that’s left of the big man. He’s definitely unconscious, and maybe dead, Sol notes, and he’s allowing himself some self-satisfaction over that one. Even if they’re both still entirely fucked, at least he’s got one really good hit in.

God he’s an idiot. Fuck. _Fuck._

The sword-wearer watches the woman carry the much bigger man off, with less difficulty than it seems like she reasonably should be having, and then their eyes flick back to Sol. Sol wishes they weren’t wearing that obnoxious goddamn scarf— he can’t read their face when it’s all covered like that.

“I gotta say,” they say, and dammit, their voice isn’t any help, either. “I’m kind of impressed. It takes some doing to sneak up on me, to say nothing of the lady over there.” They nod in the direction in which the woman has disappeared. “Surprised it took you so long, though.” They tip their head, giving Sol what he can only assume is a considering look. “Seems sort of shitty of you to take so long to rescue your friend, huh?”

“Fuck you,” Sol spits, trying to ignore the guilt that twists immediately in his stomach. “We’re not even really friends.”

“Hmm. Then maybe you’re not an asshole— just an idiot,” they offer cheerfully.

“Wha— fuck you!” Sol raises the bat, leaps forward—swings— 

“H-hey—wait!” Kent cries from behind him. “You can’t beat him with just a—”

The sword-wearer dances easily back out of range of Sol’s swing, and Sol’s bat slams into the window of the car next to him, instead, showering both him and Kent with shards of glass. “Shit!” he scrambles to readjust his footing. “You think I don’t _know that?”_ he howls, and swings again. This time the sword-wearer raises their weapon exactly enough to slap Sol’s bat away with the flat of the blade. “Dammit— _stop fucking with me!”_

Kent is trying to get to his feet, behind him, but he falls back against the car with a cry, and struggles to raise his head to glare at Sol. “St— stop fighting, dammit! Why haven’t you—r-run away already? If you know you can’t win–- _shit—“_ His knees give way and he falls back on his ass again, wincing. “Then just _run away,_ Solemn! What the hell’s _wrong_ with— “  
The sword-wearer’s green eyes widen, just for a second. Seeing the opening, Sol lunges forward, and his opponent, startled, stumbles back a step. Then their eyes flash and their sword moves so fast Sol’s eyes lose track of it entirely for a second.

The flat of the blade smacks into Sol’s hand. He hears rather than sees the bat clatter to the ground and slide under a car.

The sword-wearer flicks the blade so that it rests against the side of Sol’s throat, his green eyes unreadable. 

Sol stares at him, ears ringing. The blow has made his hand go numb.

“Fucking dumbass,” he mumbles. The sword-wearer blinks.

Careful not to cut himself on the blade, Sol turns his head to look over his shoulder. Kent is staring at him, sprawled in the mud— he clearly kept trying to get up, even after he fell, the idiot.

“If I could’ve just run away and left you, don’t you think I would’ve fucking _done it already?”_ he snaps.

Kent’s eyes widen. “What do you— “

The moment is kind of ruined by the sound of slightly hysterical laughter.

The sword-wielder has to lower their blade so they can bend almost double, clutching their stomach, and positively howling, their laughter full and bright and weirdly child-like for such an ominous katana-wielding maniac.

Sol stares at them, and is horrified to find himself kind of embarrassed. “H-hey— what’s so fucking funny, asshole?”

Shaking their head, they wave a hand apologetically. “I’m— god— I’m sorry,” they say, wiping at their eyes. “It’s just that— th-that was so— aww, you two idiots are so cute!”

Sol bristles, wishing he still had his bat. “I’m— what the hell do you mean, _cute?”_

“Sol,” Kent says softly, pulling himself up into a sitting position, pain written in every line of his face. “I think ‘cute’ is a couple steps up from ‘dead,’ don’t you?”

“Shut up,” Sol says, and, keeping a wary eye on the enemy—who is still shaking with laughter, the asshole—he squats in front of Kent, wiping at the blood on his face with his sleeve. “This looks pretty deep, man.”

“I—“ Kent is looking very intently at the ground. “I didn’t expect you to— come back,” he says softly.

Sol stops, his hand still raised. He could cup the side of Kent’s face, if he wanted. “Yeah, I didn’t expect me to either,” he says awkwardly, looking away.

“Why did you?” Kent asks, sneaking a peek up at him, and Sol feels a flush stealing into his cheeks.

“I— I mean, I couldn’t, uh—gah!”

The sword-wearer has sheathed their weapon, and pulled the scarf down to expose a badly scarred copper-brown face— and is now openly watching him and Kent like they wish they had some popcorn.  
“Oh, don’t stop on my account,” they say brightly, waving in a _please go on sort of way._ Sol bristles.

“Come on,” he snaps, offering Kent a hand up, which Kent takes, and Sol pulls him to his feet, trying to be gentle without looking too much like he’s trying to be gentle. Kent leans heavily against his shoulder, but has the grace to at least look embarrassed about it.

“Okay,” Sol says, turning back to the sword-wearer and taking what he hopes looked like a fighting stance— it isn’t like he can actually fight without throwing Kent right back on his ass, but it’s the principle of the thing, really— “What the hell’s your deal, man? Why’d you stop? You beat me!”

They wave their hand again, dismissively. They’re wearing black fingerless gloves, and Sol notes, a little dazed, that their nails are painted pink. “Well, of course I did,” they say, not unkindly. “I was a lot better armed, and apparently a hell of a lot more experienced, too. You had absolutely no chance, babe.”

Sol bristled again. Babe, my ass. “Then why didn’t you just fucking _kill me,_ asshole?”

Grinning like a cat that has eaten several mines’ worth or canaries, they get down on their knees, reach under the car, and retrieve Sol’s bat. Sol stares at it, well and truly baffled.

“‘Cause you knew you couldn’t beat me, and you came right at me like a champ anyway, I guess.” They hold out the bat. “It was very romantic.”

Sol stares up at them. He isn’t sure there’s a word for how he’s feeling. Maybe _horrified._ He moves his lips to protest, but nothing comes out.

The sword-wearer grins over Sol’s shoulder at Kent. “You said your name was Kent, right, hon?” they say, their voice much softer, almost kind.

Kent winces back from it a little, and seems to regret it. “Uh— yeah, that’s right,” he says weakly. “Kent Graves.”

“Very pleased, Kent Graves,” they say cheerfully. “I’m Paxon Field, member of God’s Hammer, at your service, sir!” Then they deflate a little. “Or— former member, now, possibly. What about you, babe?”

“Ro _mantic?”_ Sol demands, furiously.

“He’s Sol Michaelis,” Kent says blandly.

“So, what— you guys came here to steal a car, then?”

Sol glares at them. “Yeah, we did. What’s it to you?”

For just a second, an unreadable look flashes across their face. Then they’re all cat-smiles again. “Really,” they say cheerfully. “Either of you know how to hotwire a car?”

“Yes,” Sol says haughtily, “we do.”

“Oh, impressive!” Then they bite their scarred lip and tilt their head, so obviously trying to be coy that Sol wonders if they’re serious. “Listen— you couldn’t show me how to do that, could you?”

“What? No!” Sol snaps.

“No?” Paxon says sweetly, pouting. “The way I see it, you owe me for not killing you the second I saw you, right?”

“We don’t owe you a goddamn thing,” Sol growls, and he turns on his heel, letting Kent cling to his arm like a Victorian maiden. “Come on, man, let’s go.”

“Aww, please?” Paxon whines, skipping to keep pace with them. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise!”

“Fuck off!” Annoyed, Sol slows a little so he isn’t dragging Kent along behind him. “There ain’t a thing you have we want, asshole!”

“No?” Paxon switches from a pout to a calculating smirk so fast it’s actually fairly alarming. “You sure? You’re heading out of the city, aren’t you?” they say sweetly.

Sol falters. “So what if we are?”

“The way things are now, it’s probably mighty dangerous out there.”

“Aw, shut up! We can take care of ourselves!”

“Really?” Paxon lets his eyes trail significantly over Kent, who’s really having trouble walking, now, his breath coming in gasps. “You both can?”

Sol glares at him, beginning to feel a little uncertain.

“I’m an excellent driver,” Paxon concludes, still in step with them, and now they look positively smug.

Sol opens his mouth to refuse again— and Kent says weakly in his ear, “Come on, Sol. You think it’s worth trying to stop them, if they want to come with us?”

Sol growls. But—it's kind of hard to argue with Kent, somehow.


	8. Gas Station

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sol is Not Worrying. Kent has a mild flashback. Pax is trying to give themself diabetes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: referenced domestic violence/child abuse, PTSD flashback.

They’re ten miles outside of the city by the time they run out of gas.

“I can’t fucking believe we’re stopping already,” Sol says, frowning out the window. The rain has turned into a thick white fog that hangs low over the road and makes the lights of the gas station smoky and indistinct.

“Not my fault you picked a car with only half a tank,” Paxon sing-songs, but when Sol turns to glare at them he sees that their shoulders are tight and their hands are sort of white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

“Do you think it’s safe here?” Kent asks from the back seat, and Sol turns back to frown at him. He fell asleep almost the second they started driving, his bruised forehead resting against his window in a way that seems like it must hurt, and Sol is–-a little more worried about him than he wants to admit, maybe.

He looks–-pretty awful, Sol thinks. Well, they both do, really, but like, Kent looks _especially_ awful.

“Should be,” Pax says brightly, and pops their car door open like there’s not a thing in the world to be afraid of, though Sol notes that they’re very quick to open the backseat driver’s side door and pick up their sword from where they put it when they climbed in. “The bleeders don’t spread that fast, so I’d be pretty surprised if they’ve made it this far already.”

Without really meaning to, Sol exchanges a worried look with Kent. Kent bites his lip, looking— a little afraid.

Sol has a sudden, insane desire to reach out and ruffle Kent’s hair and tell him it’s all gonna be okay, which he mashes down inside himself with savage force.

“Hey,” Sol calls, crawling over into Paxon’s vacated seat and rolling down the window, “don’t you think it’s gonna be a little suspicious if somebody sees you pumping gas while wearing a huge fuckin’ _sword,_ genius?”  
“Like _you’d_ be brave enough to complain about it,” Paxon says sweetly. “You guys wanna go buy somethin’ from the store? Advil or something, at least? You’re lookin’ a little green around the gills, sunshine.” Sol notes with some annoyance but no surprise that their voice is a lot less snide when they’re talking to Kent, which— tracks, honestly.

“No, that’s alright,” Kent says softly. “We wouldn’t want to leave you all by yourself out here.”

Surprised, Paxon turns back to look at Kent, and Kent holds their gaze with an expression Sol can’t read for the life of him— but it seems to make Paxon uncomfortable.

“Uh— yeah,” they say, with an awkward laugh, and turn back to watch the pump, fidgeting. “We’ll— all go in together, then. I could use some coffee if we’re gonna keep driving.”

Sol looks from Kent’s unreadable expression to Paxon’s tight, uncomfortable-looking back, confused. “Uh— what the hell was that?”

Kent’s face clears immediately, and he gives Sol a smile. It’s— kind of unsettling, actually. “What was what?” he asks, and sounds for all the world like he’s honestly confused.

“Uh— “ Maybe he’s imagining things, and nothing significant passed between them after all. Sol shakes his head. “Nothing, I guess.” He frowns at Paxon’s back— they’ve swung their sword back over their shoulder, like it was when he first saw them. “You’re not really gonna go into a convenience store with that thing, are you?”

Paxon fishes around in the pockets of the hideous pink motorcycle jacket they’ve got on under their equally-hideous poncho. “Guess I am,” they say lightly, though their cheer sounds even more forced this time. “Sunshine’s right— we should stick together, us three.”

As they say this they turn back to tip Sol a wink over their shoulder. Rolling his eyes, he relaxes a little. Guess it was my imagination after all.

Apparently, the “bleeders” have _not_ reached this little highway gas station yet. On the bright side, that means nobody suddenly gnawing on his arm as they walk through the parking lot. On the downside, boy do they get funny looks from the front desk clerk, who seems to be debating whether he should kick them out or not.

Kent flushes under his bruises and tries to absolutely no effect to rearrange his blood-caked bangs, but Paxon just shoots the clerk a wide scarred grin and bids him a cheerful ‘good evening,’ and the clerk quails under Paxon’s gaze and apparently decides it isn’t worth it.

Despite Paxon’s assertion that they should ‘stick together,’ he and Kent almost immediately dart off in separate directions— Paxon to the coffee machine, Kent to the pharmaceuticals aisle. Sol is torn for a second between his desire to keep a sharp eye on Paxon at all times and the need to make sure that Kent, who is not exactly steady on his feet, doesn’t keel over, and he— isn’t sure how to feel about the fact that it’s the second impulse that wins out. Keeping close on Kent’s heels, Sol compensates by glancing over his shoulder at Paxon. 

Paxon, noticing, pauses in the act of dispensing coffee to raise an eyebrow and waggle their fingers at him. He flips them off.

“Hey, Sol,” Kent says in a low voice, as they reach the aisle filled with over-the-counter pain killers and also chewing gum, for whatever reason. “Are you doing okay?”

Sol stares at Kent, whose entire torso seems to be made out of bruises. “Are— are you fucking kidding me, man?”

“Your wrist, I mean,” Kent says, gesturing at the offending limb. It’s gone sort of purple and is swelling a little, and Sol doesn’t mind admitting to himself that wow it does hurt _a lot._ “You hurt it when you were fighting— didn’t you?”

Sol was kind of hoping Kent hadn’t noticed. He looks away, shuffling his feet. “It’s no big deal. I didn’t even notice, in the moment.” That much is true, anyway— he was too pumped full of adrenaline to even register the pressure he was putting on the recently-relocated bones until they’d already been in the truck, at which point he’d had to fight pretty hard not to cry in front of Paxon Field— but Kent was asleep by that point, anyway.

Kent gives him a look that says pretty clearly how much of Sol’s bullshit he’s buying, and reaches for a box labeled Motrin.

He freezes before his fingers touch it, though, and his face goes totally blank, like someone has just hit his ‘off’ switch.

“Uh—” Sol reaches out for his shoulder.

Smiling, Kent moves just out of Sol’s reach, like he’s trying to be subtle about it. “Sorry,” he says, a little too loudly, and grabs a box of Advil, instead. “This should help with the swelling,” he says, pressing it into Sol’s good hand— the one he reached out with.

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” Sol mumbles, frowning down at the box, which is the same damn medication as the first one, and Kent smiles at him brightly for another second before turning to wander back over toward Paxon.

Sol tries to ignore the uneasy fluttering in his stomach. Because— goddamn, he has way bigger things to worry about than Kent Graves’s mental wellbeing.

Maybe it was a mistake to come with him, Sol thinks, miserably.

——

Sol is still staring down at the box of Advil Kent handed him, and Paxon is preoccupied with pouring far too much sugar into their coffee, so Kent takes a second to press his hand over his mouth and close his eyes.

He thinks of the first time he ran to his mother, after his father’s fist sent him crashing to the ground. She’d smiled, and dabbed at the blood on his face with a tissue, and told him that everybody lost their baby teeth sooner or later. And when he told her that it hurt, she handed him painkillers.

She didn’t even notice the first time he hit Chase, so it had been Kent’s turn to pass along the lie

(it’s alright, it just happens sometimes when he gets angry)

and climb up to the top shelf for the Motrin.

Chase— 

_(IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!)_

Kent runs a finger over his scar and forces a smile back onto his face. Because he’s alright. He can do this, if only because he has to. He’ll get to St. Ben’s, and then— 

Well. He guesses Sol will know the whole thing, then. That thought turns his stomach even more than he expects it to.

Maybe it was a mistake to let him come.

——

Pax doesn’t actually like coffee, which is why they’re currently stirring their third packet of sugar into the cup; but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than any of the energy drinks and they have a feeling neither of their two freeloaders possesses a penny to their names, which means they better start saying up.

…Okay, maybe ‘freeloaders’ isn’t really fair.

This, they’re starting to realize, might be a little bit harder than they thought it would be.

Solemn Michaelis, whatever else he might be, is at least easy as hell to read— he doesn’t trust Pax, and probably never will unless Pax really works at it, which they aren’t sure they need to bother with. In fact, he said as much, when he shepherded Kent into the back seat and climbed into the passenger seat himself.

“Boy, I’m flattered,” Pax said, grinning. “Didn’t expect you to be so eager to sit with me!”

And Sol said, “Fuck you. I just wanna be right here if you try anything funny, asshole. Kent might be dumb enough to trust you,” (he said this very loudly, and Kent serenely ignored him) “but I sure as hell don’t.”

And then he proceeded to glare at Pax for the first twenty minutes of the car ride. Which is fine. Pax doesn’t need Solemn to like them, particularly.

Which brings them around nicely to Kent Graves, who was nothing but polite and courteous to Pax until he went quite peacefully to sleep in the backseat, which had of course led Pax to dismiss him as a bit of an idiot.

Which. Is actually a little embarrassing, now.

Because all he had to say was that he didn’t one to leave Pax on their own, and Pax immediately saw what he really meant, which was— well, he didn’t trust Pax either. And Pax hadn’t noticed that at all until just now, and they were fairly certain the only reason they knew how he felt now was because Kent Graves wanted them to know.

Maybe it was a mistake to take him with, Pax thinks, taking a sip of sickly-sweet coffee.


	9. Roadside (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sol resists sleep. Kent doesn't. Pax makes a phone call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: Kent and therefore referenced suicidal ideation, Vic's Creepy Vibes, including dehumanizing language and one creepy trans-related comment.

Between the medication-induced dulling of the pain in his wrist and the soft hum of the truck’s engine under him, Sol is kind of fighting to stay awake.

“You can check out for a while, you know, kid,” Paxon says, glancing at him sideways for a second. “I don’t mind.”

Sol shoots them a glare, but when he opens his mouth Paxon rolls his eyes and takes a hand off the steering wheel to wave dismissively at him. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m an untrustworthy shmuck and you’re ashamed to be working with me, I’ve heard the speech.” They sound— a little annoyed. They’ve been driving for a few hours now, Sol guesses. Maybe they’re grumpy. Repositioning their hands on the wheel, they glare out at the dark road in front of them. “Honestly, what do you think I’m gonna do, man? I’m driving.”

“I dunno,” Sol says, maybe a little bit petulant. “That’s why I wanna keep my eye on you.”

Paxon looks at him, out of the corner of their eye, just long enough that Sol has to fight down the urge to snap at them to just watch the damn road, already. Then they sigh and focus back through the windshield. “Okay, look, I’ll tell you what. If I try to act on whatever sinister intentions you assume I have, I’ll have to stop the car, won’t I?”

Sol examines their profile, to see if it looks like they’re trying to trick him. They mostly just look tired and irritated, though. “I guess,” he says doubtfully.

“And the sudden lack of engine noise will wake you up if I stop. Won’t it?”

Sol is— not actually sure about that. On the one hand, maybe not. He hasn’t had to worry about being able to leap awake at the slightest disturbance since he got his apartment, almost a year and a half ago now. On the other hand, there’s no way he’s going to admit he’s been spoiled by a year of living comfortable to Paxon Field, who clearly has no such disadvantage. “I— guess so. Yes.”

He still doesn’t relax, though, and Paxon, noticing, finally thumps their free hand against the steering wheel angrily and glares ahead at the windshield. “You know what? Fine. You wanna be exhausted and miserable tomorrow, you just go right on ahead, babe. I’m sure I don’t care what you do.” And then they reach for the radio and snap on an 80s pop song, though they keep the volume down, presumably out of respect for Kent, who’s been asleep for an hour at least and doesn’t seem to piss them off half as much as Sol does.

That’s what convinces him it’s safe to sleep, actually. At least for a few hours. The truth is, he can barely keep his eyes open.

He makes it through “Love Shack” and “Come On Eileen,” but halfway through “Every Breath You Take” he stops jolting himself awake and lets himself drift, finally.

This song’s so fucking creepy, he thinks, and sinks into uneasy dreams filled with teeth and eyes that drip with blood.

——

Pax waits twenty minutes after Sol’s breath has slowed to a steady rhythm, curled up in his seat like a little kid, before they pull their phone out of the pocket of their coat and send up a short, non-specific prayer to thank whatever deities might be listening that there’s still cell service.

It’s— actually kind of embarrassing how well they still remember the number.

 _“Hello?”_ The silky voice sounds kind of confused, and maybe a little sleep-heavy, so at least there’s that.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Pax says mildly, cranking the music just a little, so they’re voice will be lost among the synth riffs.

There’s a surprised intake of breath, but when the voice speaks again, it’s filled with a vindictive sort of pleasure. _“My god, I never thought I’d hear that voice again. What’s the news, little Paxon Field? You don’t expect me to come to your rescue again after all these years, do you?”_

Pax’s lungs empty themselves in a huff of mirthless laughter so hard they sort of half hunch over the steering wheel, the corners of their scarred mouth pulling up into a furious grin with the effort of not raising their voice. “No, I don’t,” they say sweetly. “In fact, just the opposite, sweetheart.”

 _“Oh?”_ They hear the smile in his voice, and remember what it looks like— all sparkling dark eyes and sharp white teeth. _“Do tell.”_

“I found something,” Pax says, trying to keep from snarling. “Something you’re looking for, if the rumors I hear are true.”

Silence on the other end of the line. Pax waited. They can’t fuck this up. They will not fuck this up. They’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this for too goddamn long.

 _“Have you,”_ the man says flatly. He doesn’t sound like he’s relishing the idea. On the one hand, the uneasy displeasure in his voice is like music to Pax’s ears, but on the other hand— 

“Yeah,” Pax says sweetly. “And I think I’d like to make a deal with you, old man.”

Another surprised silence. Pax wonders if they’ve been too forward. Fuck this espionage bullshit.

 _“You would.”_ The man is taking his sweet time considering it, and Pax hasn’t even set their terms yet, dammit. _“I’ll be honest, Paxon— that surprises me.”_

“I’ll bring you—what you want,” Pax says, looking straight forward through the windshield. “And you can start writing the check now and keep adding zeroes till I get there.”

They pause again. Goddamn the old man and his slow-ass business deals. …Goddamn the old man just in general, too.

_“You want money.”_

Okay, moment of truth. Pax does their best to sound defensive and a little ashamed of themself. It isn’t very hard. “Hey, fuck you, man. The world’s ending. I need enough cash to get outta the country while planes are still flying, and enough to settle on after that. If anybody can understand that, you’d think it’d be you. Don’t think I can’t smell your brand of weird science all over this, you fucking freak.”

The old man laughs. Okay. So far so good. _“You flatter me,”_ he says, and he really does sound flattered, the psychopath. If Pax ever doubted that the bleeders really were some of his “creations,” this is all the proof they need. _“Name your terms, puppy.”_

For a second, Pax forgets themself. “First of all, you call me that one more time and I’m driving this fucking truck off a cliff with your cargo inside, you get me?”

Sol shifts in his sleep, just slightly. Pax winces, but the boy’s breathing settles back out quick enough.

The old man chuckles in his ear. Pax feels their lip curl into a snarl.

_“Yes, yes, I’m sorry— Paxon. Your voice brings back such memories, a man forgets himself. Can you bring yourself to forgive me?”_

Paxon’s hand tightens convulsively on their phone, and the other is growing white-knuckled on the steering wheel, but they fight very hard to keep their voice light.

“I think the fact that I didn’t kill your cargo the second I heard his name proves I’m the forgiving sort— to a point,” they say brightly.

 _“His— oh. Oh!”_ Pax frowns, bracing themself to hear whatever unpleasantness the man is revving up for, but then the voice in his ear softens. _“That’s right, isn’t it? It’s been— too many years.”_

 _“I always wanted a son,”_ the man says in a voice that makes Pax shudder all the way down to their toes.

“Want whatever you want,” Pax says through numb lips. “I want three hundred thousand.”

The old man hums. Pax has been real careful about that amount— high enough to sound real, but not high enough to be refused outright.

_“What do you say to one-fifty, dear? I want what you’re bringing me, but there’s no reason to take an old man’s savings, is there?”_

There’s an awful snakey smile in his voice, now, and although Pax fucking hates all these stupid mind games, they’re fairly confident that this is a test.

“Well fuck you too, then,” they snap, and make sure to brush their phone against the side of their face so he can hear them removing it from their ear.

 _“Alright, alright,”_ he calls loudly, laughing, and Pax releases the breath they’ve been holding and brings the phone back up. _“I just wanted to be sure you meant business, old friend. Three hundred it is.”_

Thank you, god. “I ain’t your friend, shithead,” Pax says sweetly, and allows themself a moment to celebrate their victory before the man’s voice pipes up in their ear again.

 _“Well, Paxon, dear,”_ he says. _“Is that all? I know your— cargo— can be a handful. Tell me— is it giving you trouble? Perhaps I’ll have to scrounge up a finder’s fee by way of apology.”_

Pax wants to squeeze their eyes shut. But they’re driving. So the most they can have is one extra-long blink.

“He looks just like you,” Pax says, and hangs up on the man’s happy sigh.

They drive in silence, faster than they need too, like if they press their boot down on the gas hard enough they’ll stop feeling dirty. It doesn’t work, or course— it never does— so instead they run over old memories like they’re picking at wounds instead, and then their hand tightens on the phone until the plastic creaks in their fist.

“Vic Michaelis,” they say, like a curse and also a promise. “I’m gonna take a bath in your blood, you fucking shithead.”

——

Pax almost jumps out of their skin when they glance in the rearview mirror and see Kent Graves staring out the window at the dark countryside, looking tired and a little ill but most definitely awake. 

They slip their phone into their pocket— it’s been switched off for only a little more than fifteen minutes now— and shoot a grin into the mirror, hoping it’ll look more genuine than it feels.

“Mornin,’ sleeping beauty,” they say softly. “You sleep okay?”

Kent blinks slowly, first up at Pax and then down to the clock on the dashboard. “Oh,” he says, his pretty voice a little scratchy with sleep. “I guess it is morning, huh? Have you been driving all night?”

Eyes back on the road, they shrug. “Guess so. No big deal. Not my first all-nighter.” They smile up at the mirror again. It seems fairly clear that he’s just woken up and didn’t hear a damn thing, and their spirits are quite high at the moment, end of the world or no. They kind of like Kent in spite of themself— the longer they can go on being friends the better, as far as Pax is concerned. “I’m in a hell of a lot better shape than either of you two kids, anyway.”

Kent shifts, winces, readjusts his position to put less pressure on his broken bones. “I— guess that’s true,” he croaks. “I feel like we’re taking advantage of your kindness, though. We can stop for a while anytime, if you want.”

Pax grins at the dark road ahead of them. This far upstate, there aren’t that many street lights, and they haven’t passed a single other car in hours, now. It’s a bit ominous. Pax grins harder. “Naw,” they say brightly. “Safer to be moving, anyway.”

Pax has their eyes on the road, but they hear the frown in Kent’s voice when he responds softly, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

There’s a pause. The truck rumbles along smoothly under them. They are getting fairly tired, actually.

“Hey— Paxon?”

Pax smiles up at the mirror. Kent is fidgeting in his seat like a little boy, his hands folded together in his lap. “What is it, sunshine?” Pax prompts, when he doesn’t continue.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Uh oh. Pax’s smile tightens a little at the corners, but they force themself to relax. “Sure, kid, shoot.” 

Kent examines his hands for a long time, and Pax watches him in the mirror, their hands tightening on the steering wheel.

“Do you know this part of the state at all?” he asks finally. “I’m, uh— I’m not totally— “

Pax blinks, and then laughs harshly, startled. “Sunshine, do you— do you not know where you’re going?”

Kent shrugs, looking up at the mirror through his lashes. “Not entirely, no.”

Pax shakes his head, grinning. “That’s fucking hilarious, sunshine. Yeah, I grew up upstate, but it’s been a long time. What do you know?”

“Uh.” Kent laughs awkwardly, picking at his face a little. “Well, I— _PAXON!”_

“Wha—” Pax looks back through the windshield just in time to see an unmistakably human form crouched in the road.

“Fuck!”

They yank the wheel to the side without thinking and their head smacks smartly into the steering wheel when the car plows into and halfway through the guardrail, which causes their vision to go bright and starry for a few seconds. They feel Kent’s weight slam into the back of their seat, and mostly just hear Sol jerk awake swearing.

The occupants of the truck sit still for a moment, a little shell-shocked, and then the front airbags deploy.

“Aw shit fuck goddammit,” Sol spits, shoving the fabric away from his face. “I am _never getting in a car again—”_

“Did we hit her?” Kent croaks urgently, rubbing his forehead where it must have struck Pax’s seat.

“Did we hit who?” Sol barks.

“I’m not sure,” Pax says, reaching up to see if their head is bleeding. It isn’t, so far. “I don’t think so.”

“Hold on—what the hell are you doing?” Sol yells. Christ, that kid is loud. Pax winces— and then turns back to find that Kent is trying to push his door open. 

“Now you just _wait right there,_ sunshine,” Pax barks. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Wh—” Kent stares from Pax to Sol, looking honestly confused. Maybe he hit his head harder than Pax thought. “Are you? There’s a little girl in the road in the middle of nowhere! I’ve gotta go see if she’s okay!”

He went for the door again, but Sol nearly leapt into the backseat to grab his arm. “Hey— hold your damn horses! She could be crazy!”

Kent shook him off. “We can’t know that from here,” he snapped.

“You don’t even have a weapon, dumbass! If you keep doing dumb-ass shit like this you’re gonna get yourself killed—”

_“Good!”_

Sol freezes like a popsicle. Kent yanks the door open and stumbles out onto the shoulder. Recovering, Sol yells “H—Hey, dumbass, wait the hell up!” and runs out after him.

“God fucking dammit,” says Pax, and reaches into the backseat for their sword.


	10. Roadside (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent projects. Sol hesitates. Pax doesn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: minor character death; Bad Things Happening To Kids; bad things signaled by coughing which I recognize is not a great look for this the year of our lord 2020 and I apologize for that; trauma induced low self worth; passive suicidal tendencies (but like, at the VERY edge of “””passive”””); This Is A Zombie Story So Yeah Expect The Genre Conventions, You Can Tell It’s Tense Because Of How Many M Dashes There Are.
> 
> This chapter is shorter because Writing It Hurt Me.

Kent reaches the little girl before Sol can catch up with him, and Sol is extremely grateful to have grabbed his makeshift bat before they left the car lot, if only because it feels good to have something to hold onto.

He didn’t see her, before— he didn’t wake up until the car jolted to a stop agaisnt the guardrail, and wow he’s really getting tired of the car accidents— but she’s there, alright, sitting in the middle of the road, no older than nine, with tangled brown hair and her small hands pressed hard over her face.

Kent immediately crouches in front of her and smiles, and Sol tightens his hands on his bat and picks up his pace, hearing Pax growl behind him.

“Hi there,” Kent is saying, his velvet voice gentle. “You okay? Miss? Hey, it’s okay, we won’t hurt you.”

The little girl lowers her hands, slowly. Her eyes are full of tears, but they aren’t bloody, as far as Sol can tall; he feels his shoulders relax a little.

She looks up at Kent, her eyes very wide and her hands clasped tightly under her chin, but says nothing.

“Are you okay, honey?” Kent asks again, and when she doesn’t do anything but stare at him, he smiles and scoots back a little, away from her. “It’s okay. We want to help you, if you’ll let us. What’s your name?”

She sways a little, tears streaming down her face. “It— It’s Leah,” she says in a small voice. “I’m Leah. Please—” She brings her hands back up to her face again, and that’s when Sol sees the large bloodstain spreading across the collar of her shirt. “Please help me, it hurts so much— “

“Aw, shit,” Sol says, taking half a step back. Kent doesn’t move.

“Okay,” he says, reaching carefully forward to tuck a curl of hair behind her ear. He gives her plenty of space to move back, and she leans in slightly, shivering. “Okay. We’re gonna do our best to help you, alright? Do you live near here?”

“Kent,” Sol says.

The little girl hesitates, and then nods slowly. “I-I— I live that way,” she says, pointing off to the left side of the road. “B-but— but nobody’s— home.”

“Kent, come on, man, let’s go.”

“Nobody’s home?” Kent says sympathetically. “They left you all by yourself at night-time?”

Leah lowers her hands, her eyes widening even further, and then she covers her mouth, and shakes her head.

“My father— m— my father— “

“Aw, shit,” Sol says again. “Listen— kid—“

“Sol, shut up,” Kent says very gently. “What about your father, honey?”

“M-my father— m-my— my— “

The little girl tangles her hands in her hair and _screams,_ so loudly that Kent does actually wince back— but then he recovers and very gently reaches for her wrists, pulling her hands away from her head.

“Okay,” he says desperately, “okay, it’s okay, you’re safe now, alright? We’re gonna take care of you. Paxon!”

“Yeah, what do you want,” Paxon says from behind him, and Sol, who almost forgot they existed, jumps badly. 

They’re standing on the shoulder, near the car, and looking determinedly down at the gravel. Their hand is very tight on the hilt of their sword.

“Do you have a phone?” Kent asks, and Paxon jumps like they’re shot. 

_“Uh,”_ they say sharply, and then recover and reach into their pocket. “Y-yeah, yes, I got one.”

“I want you to call 911, okay?” He turns back to the little girl, smiling again. “We’re gonna get you all taken care of, okay? You’re safe with us.”

Leah gasps, and grabs at Kent’s sleeves, shaking her head wildly. “N-no! No, I can’t leave her! I can’t leave her!”

“Can’t leave who?” Kent frowns, eyes shining with distressed sympathy. “Honey, you’ve got to worry first about—“

She shakes her head again, her hands finding their way back into her hair. “She told me to wait, she told me to wait, but I got scared in the house with— “ She jerks her head back up to look at Kent, hands reaching jerkily for the collar of his jacket. “I have to wait! I have to wait until she comes back for me!”

Pax swears. “Moot point anyway, babe,” they say grimly, mashing the disconnect button on their phone with more force than they need. “Service is down. Guess that means this shit really is spreading."

Kent bites his lip, looking at the little girl, who is properly sobbing, now.

“Kent, come on,” Sol says, although the sound of the little girl’s tears is turning his stomach. “We can’t stay here and we can’t take her with us. We gotta go.”

“Shut the hell up,” Kent snaps at him, and then his face immediately smoothes out. “It’s okay, honey. Who are you waiting for?”

“My sister—” she sobs. “Please, my big sister, she’ll come and find me, just please, _please_ don’t leave me alone anymore, please—“

Sol winces.

“Okay,” Kent says simply. “Okay, I’ll wait with you here until she comes.”

The little girl looks up at him like he’s a fucking angel of the lord, and then she throws her little arms around his neck and sobs loudly into his chest. Kent presses a hand over his mouth to keep from crying out when her forehead hits his collarbone, and pats her somewhat awkwardly on the shoulder with his free hand.

“Aw, fuck,” Sol says, running a hand through his hair.

Kent is silent for a second, and then he looks over his shoulder at Sol, his bruised-up face impassive. “You don’t have to stay with me. In fact, I’d kind of rather you didn’t. Why don’t you two go back to the city, or keep heading upstate until you find somewhere safe. I’m gonna stay here with Miss Leah.”

Sol shakes his head. “Aw, come on, man. Come on, you know you can’t do that.”

“It was very kind of you to come with me this far, Solemn. But I wouldn’t dream of asking you to stay. Thanks for all your help, both of you.”

Paxon very deliberately turns their back, shoulders tense.

“Kent,” Sol says very quietly. “You say just as well as I did, man.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Dammit, Kent— “

Leah’s hands tighten on the back of Kent’s jacket. Dammit, he doesn’t wanna say it.

“She’s _bit,_ okay?” He shakes his head, then raises his voice a little. “Kid, listen— I’m sorry, okay?” She winces, curling tighter in on herself. She’s almost in Kent’s lap, now, and dammit, he needs to get out of there _now._ “I’m— I’m so goddamn sorry. I wish we could help you. But we can’t. Kent, come on.”

Leah’s small hands pull into fists. Kent winces as her forehead pushes against his collarbone. “You said,” she says softly. “You said you’d wait.”

Kent swallows hard, and puts his hand very gently on the top of her head, like he isn’t sure what else to do with it. “I said it and I meant it, honey.”

“Did you lie,” she says softly. Her voice is beginning to sound strangely— clotted. Wet, almost.

“Oh, _shit,”_ Sol says.

“No, I didn’t,” Kent says in a very carefully measured voice, like he’s trying very hard to stay calm. “Sol doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If you want me to stay with you, I’ll stay with you. Okay?” 

Leah’s arms must be tightening around Kent’s shoulders, because he seems to be having trouble breathing, now. Sol raises his bat a little, having absolutely no damn idea what he’s planning to do with it.

“You promise?” Leah says softly, her head still buried against Kent’s chest. 

“Ah— I promise, honey. But, uh—" He gasps a little. “Y-you’re—hurting me, sweetheart,” he says desperately.

Leah freezes, and then, very slowly, loosens her hands and shoves him backwards, away from her.

“A-alright, I’m sorry,” she says desperately, looking from Kent to Sol, and shifting into a crouch, like she’s getting ready to bolt. “I’m sorry, I’m— I’m _sorry.”_

“Th— that’s alright,” Kent says, breathlessly. He bites his lip. “Maybe if you just— if you just stay calm—”

Leah presses her hands over her mouth, harsh wet coughs wracking her small frame.

“Oh, no,” Kent says defeatedly, and fidgets like he isn’t sure if he should go over to help or run, which is the closest he’s come to showing any survival instincts at all.

Sol can’t do this. She’s a little kid, he _can’t—_

Leah lowers her hands slowly, staring at the blood that’s poured out of her mouth. Then she looks up at Kent, almost defensive. She shakes her head, backing away.

“I’m not,” she says. “I’m not like my father, I’m not, I— ah!” She stumbles and lands hard, her eyes filling with tears again.

“No, you’re not,” Kent agrees easily, getting slowly to his feet. “You’re a good girl. Right?”

Squeezing her eyes shut, she nods vigorously. “I’m good,” she whispers, pressing her bloody hands to the sides of her head. “I’m good, I’m good—"

“You are,” Kent says gently. “You’re perfect. So I want you to open your eyes, and breathe with me, okay?”

Leah opens her eyes, slowly. A small fleck of red is starting to grow in the left one. She lowers her hands, and nods again, slower.

Kent smiles. “There you go, that’s great. What a good girl. Okay, honey, we’re gonna breathe in together, real slow, okay?”

“Kent, what are you doing?”

“Sol, shut the fuck up for once,” Kent says, still in that low, soothing voice. “Let it out now, honey, okay? Through your mouth, slow, with me.”

Leah has squeezed her eyes shut, and is half curled in on herself, her hands tangled in her hair again, but she seems to be doing as she’s told.

“Kent, we don’t know if this’ll _work,”_ Sol hisses, stepping closer to him, and Kent shoves him away, shooting him a glare. Sol realizes suddenly that he’s shaking.

“We won’t know unless we try,” he snaps under his breath. “Get back in the car if you’re so fucking scared. Okay,” he says brightly, turning back to Leah. “Now let’s breath in for a little longer, okay? Can you do that for me, honey?”

Leah doesn’t respond. Her hands are in fists in her hair, and Sol doesn’t see her chest rising at all.

Kent squeezes his hands into fists to try and keep them from shaking, but it doesn’t work. “Honey?” he tries again, and his voice breaks on the second syllable.

A single drop of blood trembles in Leah’s eyelashes, and then falls from her closed eye and, in the sudden airless silence, Sol can almost hear it splash against her white pajama pants.

Leah’s eyes snap open.

Sol’s hands loosen on the handle of his makeshift bat entirely of their own accord  
(she’s a little girl i can’t i can’t i _can't)_

and he doesn’t have time to do anything except reach uselessly for Kent’s collar to yank him away before there’s a bright flash of silver and the little girl’s head is separated from her shoulders.

Leah’s body falls almost without a sound— Sol’s bat, clattering to the asphalt, is louder.

 _"No,”_ Kent says, so softly Sol almost doesn’t hear it.

Paxon looks down at the blood on their sword like they want to be sick, just for a second, and then they toss their head and wipe it off on their pant leg.

“Come on, kids,” they say flatly. “The car’s just dented. It’ll drive. Let’s get fucking moving.”


	11. Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent and Pax have incompatible methods for coping with trauma. Sol tries to make due with the trio’s one communal brain cell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: suicidal ideation which is not handled particularly well by companions, Kent gets triggered and doesn’t explain that to anyone, referenced past domestic abuse, gore, eye horror, terrible communication skills, Sol is trying his fucking best but nobody does a great job here, Vehicular Horror (as in many zombies get run over by cars idk how to warn for that exactly)

Sol stares at Pax, revulsion rising in the back of his throat, but he’s honestly startled when Kent is suddenly on his feet and shoving Pax in the chest.

Pax stumbles back from Kent, who is suddenly his full six feet, eyes blazing.

 _“You goddamn bastard!”_ Kent screams. “How the hell could you— I might still have been able to—"

Pax slaps him.

“Shut the fuck up,” Pax says, their voice low and dangerous. “What, you think that was super easy for me, you spoiled little shithead? You think I liked that?” Pax is shorter than Kent, almost certainly, but their slap bowled Kent halfway over, and he hasn’t straightened, his hair hiding his face. _“We all. Wanted. To help,”_ Pax snarls. “But we’re not all trying to feed ourselves to zombies, you dumb asshole, you don’t get to decide that for the rest of us. I’ve got my own reasons for wanting you to get where you’re going but I _will not die for you,_ you got that? You want to be a martyr, go do it someplace else.” He rounds on Sol. _“And what the hell is your problem?”_

Sol, who has been tugging on Paxon’s sleeve, points.

“Oh, _fuck_ me,” says Paxon.

It’s hard to really make them out in just the truck’s headlights, but there are at least three figures standing at the edge of the trees on the other side of the road. Backing up to stand behind Paxon— he’s pretty sure he’s past the point of being ashamed of himself— Sol spots a fourth. And— there’s a fifth, too.

“Back in the car?” Sol prompts, a tad desperately.

“Back in the car,” Pax agrees, taking a step toward the truck.

Sol reaches down to pick up his bat from the asphalt, and as soon as he closes his hand around it one of the figures breaks from the others and lurches at a jerking, unsteady run toward the circle of headlights.

 _“Shit!”_ Sol squawks, stumbling backwards, but Paxon, their sword swishing smoothly out of its sheath, surges forward to meet the man and slices through his neck in one clean swipe.

“There a reason you two idiots ain’t _running yet?”_ they growl over their shoulder, and Sol shakes his head clear and takes off toward the truck, grabbing hold of Kent’s collar on the way past and dragging him along.

Kent stumbles after him, his head still bowed, and finally croaks, “Wait, we— we can’t just leave them to— “

“I think they got this,” Sol snaps, and glances over his shoulder to see Pax spin to neatly decapitate a second running, bloody-eyed figure. “‘Sides,” he goes on, a bit snidely, yanking the driver’s side door open, “how exactly were you gonna help without a _weapon,_ genius?”

Kent climbs into the back seat, not meeting Sol’s eyes. He’s breathing heavy, and his hands are in tight, shaking fists in his lap. 

It occurs to Sol that he has now seen Kent slapped twice in the very short time he’s known him. There’s no time to think about that now, but it— maybe bears examination later.

“You know how to drive, right?” Kent mutters, at the floor of the truck.

“‘Course I do,” Sol snaps, throwing the car in reverse and taking a deep breath. “Mostly!”

He rolls his window down. “Coming on your left, Pax!”

Paxon pauses with their sword in the stomach of a very large man whose eyes have spilled out in bloody streams down his cheeks— Sol gags a little before he makes himself focus on driving— to glare at the truck over their shoulder, and then they readjust their grip and slice the man clear in half, before swinging their sword straight down through one of his ruined eyes. Sol sees Kent wince and throw a hand over his mouth in the rearview mirror.

“Take your time,” Paxon calls, sword flashing. There’s beginning to be kind of a large pile of bodies around them. “I’m enjoying myself out here.”

“Wow,” Sol says, focusing on reversing the car in such a way that he will not run Paxon over. He does his best to ignore the sickening lurch of the car as it rolls over one body, then two. “You really pissed them off.”

Kent glares at the floor of the truck. Yeah, they’re going to have to have a long conversation about this later, assuming they can actually get out of this.

When the truck rolls to a stop beside them, Paxon yanks the passenger side door open and climbs in, turning as they do so to shove their sword straight into a lunging man’s open mouth and up into his brain.

“Uh—” Sol swallows. “You good?”

“If you are,” they snap, settling into their seat and slamming the door closed.

“We, uh, we are, we’re—” He clears his throat awkwardly. Kent is still glaring at the floor, and Paxon is staring out the window, which a woman with blood running down her chin is now throwing herself against. “We’re great. Yeah.”

Sol puts the car clumsily into drive and slams his foot down on the gas, apparently a bit too hard.

A small dark figure is illuminated by the headlights for a second before they disappear under the truck’s tires. Sol forces himself to keep his eyes on the road and orders himself not to think about it.

He almost swerves to avoid the next one, but Paxon reaches over and puts their hand on the wheel.

“Just hit ‘em,” they say in a low, flat voice. “It doesn’t make a damn difference either way.”

Kent makes a horrified sound from the backseat, and winces badly when the car thumps over the woman’s body.

 _“Uh,”_ Sol squawks.

“Look at ‘em,” Pax says. “They’re running right at the damn tires. They don’t give a fuck what happens to them, so why should we, huh?” They look straight forward through the windshield, and don’t look at Kent, who Sol can see jolt in the backseat; Kent tangles a hand in his own hair and pulls it, hard; Sol winces.

The next one Sol hits leaps right at the front of the car and slides up onto the hood, hitting the windshield with a sick crack. Kent squeezes his eyes shut, and Pax glares straight ahead, though their hands tighten into fists on their bloody pant legs.

“Um,” Sol says. “Are we gonna talk about this, or…?”

“No,” Kent says flatly.

“Ain’t a damn thing to talk about,” Pax snaps.

Sol rolls his eyes. “Oh, yeah, right, fine. My bad.”

The last one is another woman, and the headlights catch in her blonde hair for a second, and Sol can’t help but swerve to avoid her. He very carefully does not look at Paxon, who scowls at him.  
Finally he rolls his eyes and shoots Paxon a glare, and then he glances up at the rear view mirror to include Kent in it, too. “I’m not picking sides here, okay? I think y’all are both fuckin’ nuts.”

Pax pouts. Kent does too, a little bit.

“First of all,” Sol says, “fucking cool it with the martyr complex a little, okay, Kent? Jesus.” Kent flinches, and opens his mouth to protest, but Sol holds up one hand for silence, keeping the other carefully on the wheel. “And you,” he says, rounding on Paxon. “It’s great that you swept to our rescue, and everything, but fucking forgive us for being a little slower to adjust to the whole ‘zombie apocalypse so murder is okay now’ thing, dude. We’re not all fucking naturals like you apparently are.”

“I saved your life,” Paxon says shortly.

“Yeah, I guess,” Sol says uncomfortably. “And, like. Thanks? But do you for real not get how watching you cut a bunch of people’s heads off does not make us more likely to trust you, man?”

“Oh, Christ, not you too,” Paxon snaps, swinging their sword off their back and slamming it down at their feet. “Do neither of you kids _get_ it yet? The world has changed. Y’all’s idealism or whatever is cute, but it’s also gonna get you both killed.” They reach out and shove at Sol’s shoulder, although not very hard. They don’t even look angry anymore, not really, just— tired. “You’re not _supposed_ to trust me, dumbass. You listen, okay, both of you. I do not require that you trust me. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. And I’m not gonna trust you. And then none of us are gonna be disappointed. Okay?”

Sol blinks, feeling kind of confused and— weirdly hurt. “Uh— yeah, fine. Yeah.”

“Don’t worry,” Kent says, sharply. “We won’t.”

Pax turns back to glare at him. “Well good,” they say with their teeth bared. “You shouldn’t.”

Then they both turn and glare out opposite windows.

The tension is so thick that for a second Sol is almost glad when the engine emits a sharp pop and a puff of smoke and the truck begins to roll to a stop.

“Aw, shit,” Sol says, trying to gun the engine. “Aw, shit, no, not now—”

Paxon presses their hands over their eyes and makes a noise that sounds like it would be a scream if their teeth weren’t clenched. Kent leans forward between the passenger and driver’s seats to watch the plume of smoke drift upwards from the engine.

“Either of you know how to fix that?” he says flatly.

“I know how to hotwire cars, not fix them, man,” Sol says, flopping back in his seat and closing his eyes.

Kent hesitates. “…Paxon?”

Paxon removes one hand from their face long enough to give Kent the finger. “Fuck you, blondie, I can’t do everything around here.”

Kent frowns at the dashboard as if he can somehow guilt the engine beneath into running again. “Oh,” he says. There isn’t really much else to say.

There’s a long and very pregnant pause. Paxon massages their temples. Sol counts to ten, twice, and tries without much success to regulate his heart rate. Kent fidgets and turns in his seat to look out the back window.

“Um,” he starts, unconsciously tapping the back of Paxon’s chair like an impatient five-year-old. “I don’t think you quite— got all of them,” he says hesitantly.

Paxon takes in a long breath and then lets it out, and then they drop their hands and toss their long red ponytail. “Yeah, yeah,” they say, yanking the door handle with a little more force than necessary. “It was getting a little cramped in here, anyway.”

“H-hey— hold on!” Sol yelps, reaching for their sleeve. “Are you out of your fucking mind? We can’t go out there!”

They’re already on their feet outside the truck and repositioning their sword on their back. “Yeah, well, it would also be pretty dumb of us to stay in here and get surrounded. Rein in your underage martyr and let’s jet, babe.” They shoot Sol a shiny and very fake grin and cross in front of the truck toward the woods, boot heels clicking against the pavement. They swing their sword out of its sheath as they go and the metal glints alarmingly in the light from the headlights.

Sol frowns after them, feeling… more intimidated than he wants to.

“I hate to say it,” he mumbles at the back of Kent’s head— the blonde is kneeling on the back seat and staring out the back window— “but I think they’re probably kind of right, man. You coming?”

Kent is silent for a moment, watching the vague forms milling about in the darkness behind the truck.

“Hey,” Sol says, reaching out for his shoulder. “…Kent?”

Kent winces when Sol’s fingertips brush his coat collar, and then he looks down at his hands and mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “sorry”.

“Huh?” Sol retracts his hand hastily. That was a bad idea. In fact, it didn’t happen. He 100% did not notice Kent shaking and reach out to comfort him like somebody’s goddamn mother.

“I said, ‘you’re right,’” Kent says, turning to give him a shaky smile.

Sol blinks at him, debates calling him a liar, reaches for the car door instead. “Yeah, sure, whatever, man. Let’s just— let’s go.”

The sky is starting to spit rain, and Paxon is waiting for them with their hand on their hip and and expression of almost violent impatience on their face. They raise an eyebrow at Sol and pointedly do not look at Kent. “You took your sweet time,” they say tightly.

Kent, hugging himself a little against the cold dankness of the air, raises a hand to catch a few raindrops and frowns up at the sky. “It’s raining.”

Paxon frowns at him, and then rolls their eyes, turns on their heel and stomps off into the trees. “Yes, sunshine, it is. Thank you for pointing that out.” They sneer at him over their shoulder. “At least you’ve got your looks, kid.”

Kent wrinkles his nose at them, following. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned that,” he says, a few slivers of ice in his voice. “I’m flattered, I guess, but you’re actually not my type, Paxon.”

“Now _there’s_ a surprise,” Paxon says, rolling their eyes.

“Oh my god, you guys,” Sol runs a hand through his hair and tries to focus on not tripping over tree roots. The woods are getting thicker, and Pax is walking very quickly. “Will you please shut the fuck up.”

Kent grumbles, but shuts his mouth. Pax picks up their pace slightly, the ass.

The drizzle is turning into something more like a downpour, now, and still companionable silence is apparently too much to ask.

“What I meant,” Kent snaps after five blissful minutes of nobody snapping at anybody else, “was that it is raining, and we have no shelter, or changes of clothing, or food, or— or anything.”

“Some of us have weapons,” Paxon says sweetly. “That’s not nothing.”

Kent huffs. “I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort when we’re— what, huddled in trees, freezing to death?”

Sol wrinkles his nose. His own coat, while thick enough to stop the old man’s teeth, is not waterproof and is starting to get kind of heavy with rainwater. By morning it’ll probably smell like a wet sheep, too. Kent might be okay in his oversized black coat, but Paxon’s poncho and leather jacket don’t look warm at all, and they’re certainly not waterproof.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s, uh, a fair point. Do you have, like, a plan, Paxon?”

Paxon turns on their heel, half-skipping along backwards, dancing over the rough ground in a way that doesn’t really seem fair. “Plans are for squares, kid. Everyone knows that.”

Kent glares at them, discomfort written clear across his face. Sol looks from Kent’s shaky irritation to the tight, tense set of Paxon’s shoulders and their white-knuckled grip on their sword.

“We’re all gonna die,” he says flatly.


	12. Treetops

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pax is reluctant. Sol is soft. Kent is unwell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: illness/fever, mention of decapitation/murder, smoking mention, very lightly implied parental neglect. Also there's a moment where it seems like Sol's deadname might come up, but this is my personal guarantee that Sol's deadname will not appear in this story at any point.

Rainwater is dripping from Sol’s hair down the bridge of his nose and soaking into his shirt collar, even though if you asked him five minutes ago he’d have told you his poor abused work shirt had absorbed literally all the liquid it could physically hold. 

“Just for the record,” Kent says in a slightly breathless voice, “when I used the phrase ‘huddled in trees,’ that was sarcasm.”

Sol thinks about rolling his eyes, but given that nobody would see it from this angle, he doesn’t bother and just leaves his eyes closed instead.

“Funny,” Pax snaps, sounding, at least, no longer pretend-cheerful. “When I told you to shut the fuck up, I was serious.” Sol can hear them shifting, but doesn’t turn to look, partly because he does not care and partly because he thinks he might fall out of the tree if he tries.

“I think you should both shut up,” he says flatly, knowing he’s wasting his fucking breath.

It does earn him almost a full minute of silence, which is a step up, technically.

“The bleeders are too clumsy to climb trees,” Pax says testily, apparently unable to help themself. “Therefore, being the wonderful, coordinated living beings that we are, we are taking advantage of that weakness.”

“I know that,” Kent says, also sounding slightly testy, but even more tired and kind of in pain. “I am aware of the logic, but I gotta say that I am not feeling super coordinated at the moment.”

_“I_ know _that,”_ Sol growls. “I was the one who had to help you up, and since we are all fuckin’ exhausted from that little ordeal, how about we all just go the fuck to sleep, huh?”

Kent makes a noise that is probably supposed to convey irritation but just sounds sort of— pathetic. “I can’t sleep. I don’t understand how either of you can sleep when it’s so hot up here.”

Sol blinks his eyes open. That— does not sound like a great sign.

Careful not to overbalance and throw himself off the narrow branch currently supporting his ass, Sol cranes around the trunk of the tree to squint through the driving rain at Kent, who is leaning back against the tree with his eyes closed. Sol half-carried him up this bigass goddamn tree and set him with more care than he wants to admit in the stablest position he could find, at the fork of two large branches, but at the moment his perch there looks kind of precarious.

Checking to see that Paxon, on the opposite side and several branches higher than either himself of Kent, probably can’t see— not that he cares what they think— he leans carefully forward to lay his wrist against Kent’s forehead. It’s hard to be sure of anything when the freezing rain has turned his hands and arms into icicles, but the heat coming off Kent’s face almost makes him jump.

“Aw, great,” he mumbles, grabbing hold of his own branch so he can lean forward a little more to examine Kent’s face, which, now that he’s looking, does have kind of a greenish cast to it. “Hey, man,” he says softly, giving Kent a gentle poke on a part of his cheekbone that doesn’t seem to be bruised yet. “How ya feeling?”

Without opening his eyes, Kent heaves a tired sigh that turns halfway through into a cough. Sol freezes like a popsicle, going very quickly back over the last several hours to try and determine whether one of the bleeders could possibly have bitten him without Sol noticing— but Kent’s brief coughing fit fails to bring up any red-flecked phlegm, so Sol tries to reel in his panic. He doesn’t sound crazy, anyway— just sick. 

“Not very good,” Kent croaks, letting his eyes drift open. They look kinda glassy, but Sol sees with knee-weakening relief that they are not particularly bloodshot. “Too warm. And also shivery.”

“I fuckin’ bet,” Sol says. “You look like microwaved dogshit, dude.”

Sol chews his lip, something uncomfortably close to worry churning in his stomach. When he doesn’t move away, Kent laughs faintly, though it turns into a cough at the end.

“You sure you want to get that close?” he asks, smiling a little, though it doesn’t come close to reaching his eyes. Sol doesn’t think Kent’s smiles usually do, actually.

Sol blinks. “Huh?”

“Aren’t you worried I’ll suddenly decide to take a bit out of your arm?” Kent says, and it sounds like it’s trying to be a joke but isn’t quite making it.

Sol stares at him for a second. Then he snorts.

“Please,” Sol says, smirking. “You? I could definitely take you, crazy or not, you fucking stick. Besides, look.” Sol fishes around in the pockets of his sopping-wet jacket, ignoring Kent’s look of utter confusion.

His lighter is freezing and dripping wet, and who knows if it’ll still work as an actual _lighter_ after this, but it makes a serviceable mirror, in a pinch. He holds it up so that Kent is blinking his own wide blue eyes.

“See?” Sol says, and is surprised at the softness of his own voice. “Not a drop of blood in sight, man. You’re probably just feverish from running around in the mud with open cuts and stuff.”

“Heartening,” Kent says, reaching up to change the angle of Sol’s grip.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Sol says, smirking.

And then Sol suddenly realizes that Kent’s hand is wrapped loosely around his own, and is horrified to feel his own cheeks heating up, which is-- _so_ fucking stupid.

“Who’s ‘Rina’?” he asks curiously, blinking down at the lighter, and Sol starts badly, jerking his hand away like Kent’s question burned his fingers.

“No one,” he barks, shoving the lighter back into his pocket, leaving Kent with his hand still outstretched and lips parted slightly in surprise.

“Oh,” Kent says, blinking. “Uh, sorry, I didn’t mean to— “ He pulls back, looking carefully anywhere but at Sol’s face. “Sorry.”

Sol stares at Kent. Kent stares at the unnervingly-far-away ground.

Goddammit, it’s like kicking a puppy.

“Ugh,” Sol growls, running a hand through his hair. “Look, fine, whatever, don’t look at me like that— Karine is my little sister, okay? She always hated it when I smoked, so she used to steal my lighter all the time. That’s why it’s— that’s why.”

He had been _very mad_ at the time, in high school at some point, when he had finally wrestled his lighter back from her— after almost a week of searching and shouting half-hearted threats at her when their father wasn’t home, which was often— only to find that she had scratched _Sol Sux Shit_ on one side and her own big girly signature on the other, with a big fucking heart around it. He didn’t talk to her for a few days after that.

He didn’t through the lighter away, though, either. That was junior year, or thereabouts; he’d been Sol for a short enough time that seeing the name scratched permanently into metal was--something, even if it was followed by the words “sux shit.”

It’s been— Christ, almost four years since he’s seen her, which means she’s all grown up and definitely has at least two boyfriends by now. That thought makes him unconsciously ball up his fists, and then he’s distracted by the sound of Kent laughing at him.

“Wha— what are you laughing at?” Goddammit, is he blushing _again?_

“I’m s-sorry,” Kent says, amid honest-to-god giggles. “I-it’s just— your face—!”

Sol just barely resist the urge to cover his cheeks, trying to will the beat back out of them. “Sh-shut up, I was just—” He pulls up short. “H-hey— are you okay?”

Kent is doubled up with hard, damp-sounding coughs, so much so that Sol has to dart out a hand to keep him from falling forward off the branch.

“Kent— _hey—”_

As he’s readjusting himself to hold up Kent’s weight without falling off his own branch, there’s a rustling in the branches above them, and Paxon Field drops abruptly onto the end of Kent’s branch, like an enormous pink cat.

“Let me see your hand,” they say sharply. When Kent doesn’t immediately respond, they reach forward to tug his hand away from his face.

“Hey!” Sol snaps, trying to shove them back, “what the hell are you—!”

“Shut up,” Pax says, turning Kent’s hand over so they can examine both sides. Finding no blood on it, they relax, their hand sliding off the hilt of their sword.

“Idiot,” they say, not unkindly, and reach up to lay their wrist against Kent’s forehead. Kent, his coughing fit finally starting to subside, lets them, his weight pressing into Sol’s chest in a way that is— neither embarrassing nor pleasant but in fact entirely neutral, for sure. Pax sighs. “You’re burning up, you dumbass.”

“That’s not exactly his fault,” Sol snaps, to his own surprise more than anyone else’s. Pax raises their eyebrows at him. Kent’s eyes flutter shut. “Well,” Sol goes on, into Pax’s surprised stare. “We’ve been wandering around in the rain for a long time. He’s got— broken bones and stuff.”

Paxon gives Sol a look he can’t quite read, and then frowns down at Kent, whose cheek now sits just under Sol’s collarbone, like coughing has used up all his remaining energy. “How long have you been feelin’ the shivers, sunshine?” they bark.

Grumbling like an annoyed child, Kent turns away from Paxon, which involves burying his face against the sodden front of Sol’s shirt. Sol freezes, a violent electrical current making its way up his spine. When Kent mumbles his answer (which is unintelligible but seems to contain the words “the car”), Sol can feel his lips move against his chest, and would readjust if he could move. ...probably.

“Then it’s entirely your fault, you daft idiot,” Paxon snaps, annoyed. “Why the hell didn’t you say anything?”

Kent turns back, opening one blue eye. “I suppose,” he says coldly, “I was worried you’d decapitate me.”

Paxon, to Sol’s surprise, starts like they’ve been hit. There’s a very awkward silence. Sol is afflicted with a bizarre desire to laugh.

Then Paxon growls, long and low, and starts their descent out of the tree.

“Uh,” Sol calls after them. “Where are you going?”

“To get sunshine some medicine, I guess,” they shout back, bitterly. “Since neither of you is in any way equipped for survival, apparently.”

Sol stares down at the top of their head as they make their weirdly nimble way down out of the tree. Then he looks down at Kent, who is also frowning down at Paxon’s retreating form.

“Someone should go with them,” Kent mutters.

Sol shifts uncomfortably. “You can’t stay in this tree by yourself.”

An embarrassed flush makes its way into Kent’s pale cheeks, and he shoots Sol an apologetic look from under his lashes. Sol’s brain stops working for a second and he misses what Kent says next, but makes an educated guess that it’s some variation of “sorry for the trouble.”

“Don’t be dumb,” he says, biting his lip.

Sol runs through their options in his head, and from the unhappy look on Kent’s face he suspects the blonde is doing the same.

“Fuck,” Sol mutters, and then, making sure Kent has a firm grip on the tree trunk to go with the confused look on his face, turns himself very carefully around on his own branch so his back is to Kent, the blonde’s bony knees digging into his back slightly.

“Um,” Kent says.

“Shut up,” Sol snaps. “Put your arms around my shoulders. Try not to choke me or we will both fall and die.”

_“Um,”_ Kent says.

Sol takes a moment to bury his rapidly-reddening face in his hands and groan because _why does shit like this keep happening to him._ “Paxon shouldn’t go by themself, and you can’t stay here or climb down. This is the only _fucking_ solution, okay? I don’t like it anymore than you do, so shut up and get on.”

There’s another terrible silence, which Sol uses to pray to anybody who might be listening to give him a fucking _break_ already.

Moving carefully, like he’s waiting for Sol to stop him, Kent slides his slim arms around Sol’s shoulders, knitting his fingers together around Sol’s chest and being careful to avoid his windpipe. After a moment’s hesitation, he moves closer, awkwardly scooting forward so his legs are wrapped around Sol’s hips.

Sol, very aware of Kent’s chest and biceps and _thighs,_ clears his throat loudly.

“Okay,” he says, trying his very best to sound businesslike. “I need my hands to do the tree-climbing thing, so hold on, yeah?”

Sol can feel the heat coming off of Kent’s face where it’s buried against his shoulder even through the thick wool of his jacket, though he can’t tell how much of that is the fever and how much is embarrassment roughly equivalent— if there is a loving god— to his own.

“Yeah,” Kent mumbles miserably into Sol’s jacket. Sol feels a slightly insane giggle building in his chest. 

“Okay,” Sol says slowly. “I am now moving to the next branch over. You good?”

“Perfect,” Kent says in a very muffled voice, and shifts slightly against Sol’s back. Sol clears his throat again, and reaches out for the next branch, shifting so that he’s carrying most of Kent’s weight.

“Christ, do you ever _eat?”_ he says before they can stop himself. God, maybe they will make it to the ground, after all. “My sister’s _cat_ weighs more than you.”

Kent, his face very warm indeed, chooses not to respond. In fact, he keeps his mouth mercifully shut for almost the whole awkward, painful climb down, and Sol’s left foot is actually on solid ground when he finally mumbles, so low Sol can’t be entirely sure of the words, “Thanks, Sol. You’re wonderful.”

Sol freezes with one foot still on the lowest branch, feeling an unfamiliar sort of heat spreading in the center of his chest. Before he can stop it, his mouth twitches into something that feels suspiciously like a grin.

The feeling fades pretty quickly when he turns and sees the color Pax is turning from trying to hold in their amusement. Seeing Sol’s fiery glare and immediate, violent blush, they give up and throw their head back, sending bright peals of laughter up into the still-raining sky.

Sol bristles, his hands tightening under Kent’s thighs. “Sh-shut up! Don’t— _don’t laugh at me!”_

Pax laughs hard, holding their stomach. “Your face!” they crow delightedly. “You’re turning purple, babe!”

Sol’s blush doesn’t get any worse, but probably only because there’s no more blood left in the rest of him. “Shut up!” he squawks. “It’s your fault for leaving us up there, anyway!”

Pax shakes their head, grinning. “I didn’t say you had to come with me,” they point out. 

_“Kent_ didn’t want you wandering off by your _self,”_ Sol snaps, looking over his shoulder. “Did y— oh.”

Kent, his lips slightly parted and rain making his long lashes sparkle a little in the moonlight, has rested his head against Sol’s shoulder and is breathing long and steady, his breath making faint snuffling noises through his broken nose.

Sol stares a little.

“What’s up with sunshine?” Paxon says, a trace of worry in their voice. “He’s not _dead,_ is he?”

“No,” Sol says, a confused smile spreading over his face. “I think he’s fallen asleep.” Looking carefully anywhere but at Paxon’s stupid smug grin, he clears his throat. “Let’s just go. I’ll carry him. He isn’t heavy.”


	13. Cottage (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent has a fever. Sol and Pax become very upset.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this one genuinely hurt my heart.
> 
> TW for: panic attack, hallucinations, fever, nonsexual nudity, heavily implied/referenced past child abuse, implied/referenced past suicide attempt, begging and over-apologizing. Oh also, referenced murder of a child (she was a zombie but that is what happened) and there is a dead body in this one.

Sol stops at the door of the little house so fast he almost drops Kent on his ass; Kent whines sleepily in his ear.

“Oh my _god,”_ he says, staring at Pax in absolute horror. “That’s— are you a fucking _sociopath,_ dude? _What the fuck is wrong with you?”_

The one remaining mark in Pax’s favor is that at least they don’t look happy about it, either. “What?” they say, sounding harried. “This is the only house we knew for sure would be here, and her tracks were pretty easy to follow, it just makes— “

“I am not going in there. We are not looting the house of the little girl we,” he drops his voice, even though he knows that’s stupid, _“fucking murdered!”_

Pax bristles, they’re hand already on the door handle. _“It’s not—”_ They visibly force themself to relax. “First of all, it’s not looting if everyone who needs it is dead, don’t be a fucking narc. Second of all, it’s not looting if we need it more than they do, and your boyfriend needs whatever they’ve got, baby.”

Sol laughs hysterically. “Kent will literally die before he takes medicine we stole from that little girl’s house,” he says with complete conviction.

Pax has been facing the door, and now he turns back to Sol and raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t doubt that he will, yeah,” Pax says. “You planning on letting him?”

Sol shift’s Kent’s too-insignificant weight on his back. Kent makes a very quiet sleepy groan in his ear.

“Ugh, fuck,” Sol says. “Fine.” Pax nods and opens the front door of the house in the woods from which Leah the Dead Girl came. They take a step inside and go rigid, but then give themself a shake and stride inside.

Sol, wanting to do literally anything else, sticks his head in the door and looks around, and immediately stumbles sideways. The door opens onto the living room, and there is a dead man sprawled on the floor in front of the tv with the top of his head blown off.

“Jesus!” Sol yells, and Kent flinches against his back, gasping quietly. “What the fuck, Pax!”

Pax is trying doors off the hallway and does not look back at Sol, or the mangled corpse, either. “I didn’t fucking put it there,” they snap. “That must be dear ol’ dad.”

Sol stares at the dead man. The room smells like blood, but nothing else, yet. Must be— must be new. God.

“Oh, thank fuck. Come on,” Pax calls from the end of the hall, and Sol holds Kent’s legs securely and scurries gratefully after them. “Master with an ensuite. Jesus loves us after all.”

The bedroom is small but blessedly free of corpses. Sol kicks the door shut behind him like that will somehow help him forget there is a dead body in this house with him.

He backs up to the bed, and crouches so Kent will be close to it, and turns his head, tapping Kent’s arm.

“Hey,” he says softly. “We’re here, buddy, you can get off now.”

Kent blinks slowly, his eyes unfocused, and exhales a slow, hot breath into Sol’s ear, and then carefully unwinds his arms from around Sol’s shoulders, and Sol lowers him onto the bed. Sol turns back to him, standing quicker than he means to without Kent’s weight.

The second Sol isn’t holding him up Kent sags sideways, so completely limp that Sol has to grab his shoulders to keep him from falling right off the side of the bed. His head lolls forward like a puppet with its strings cut.

Sol drops to his knees in front of the bed, reaching for Kent’s forehead, which is bone-dry and hot as a pavement under summer sun.

“Pax,” Sol says, his voice coming out high and scared, and cups his hand on Kent’s burning cheek, resisting the urge to try and shake him awake. Kent’s eyelids flutter weakly.

“Dnnwa— don’ wnnn,” Kent mumbles, his brow furrowing.

 _“Paxon,”_ Sol cries, “he’s— “

Paxon appears at his side holding a damp cloth and an oral thermometer. “Yeah, so I hear,” he mutters, sliding the thermometer into Kent’s mouth and holding his jaw. Kent’s frown deepens and he makes a protesting noise, and Paxon leans forward and says, “don’t spit that out,” in a deep, commanding voice. Kent immediately goes completely still.

After a second Sol realizes that Kent is holding his breath.

He leaps up to sit on the bed next to Kent and wraps his arm around Kent’s narrow waist; Kent is a full head taller than him but immediately leans into him like a little boy, grabbing a weak fistful of Sol’s wet shirt. Sol hesitates, and then reaches up with his other hand to stroke Kent’s hair; Kent trembles.

“Kent,” Sol says, trying to remember the utter calm of Kent’s voice when he was first talking to the little girl who used to live in this house. “Breathe through your nose, buddy, come on.”

Kent takes a deep, shuddering breath in. Pax, still kneeling in front of him on the floor, holding Kent’s chin, darts their eyes over to Sol for a second, looking deeply troubled, and then frowns back into Kent’s face.

There’s nothing else to do, so Sol scratches Kent’s scalp lightly and counts the thermometer’s beeps. Pax is completely still, watching Kent’s face with intense focus. Kent trembles and doesn’t open his eyes, but when Sol tightens his arm around his waist and reminds him again, he does keep breathing.

The thermometer goes off after what must be seconds but feels like several years, and when Pax pulls it out of Kent’s mouth Kent sags against Sol’s side, and then turns to hide his face against Sol’s shirt, and Sol realizes with a start that he’s crying. 

“That was good, Kent,” Pax says, and Kent shivers against Sol’s chest. Pax looks down at the thermometer’s display, and pales slightly. “Fuck. Okay. Hold on.” They get to their feet and whirl back to the bathroom to rummage through the cupboards some more.

Sol doesn’t pick up the thermometer when they drop it; the specific number is deeply not worth letting go of Kent at this stage. Kent is pressing his head against Sol’s chest, making his tall body as small as possible, and he’s breathing hard, his arms around Sol’s waist. Sol tightens his own arm around Kent’s waist, and Kent’s breath hitches, becoming more like sobbing.

“Hey,” Sol says, desperately. “Kent, it’s okay, it’s— we’re gonna take care of you. Can you relax for me a little bit, buddy?”

Kent shudders violently, and he folds over completely until his forehead is resting on Sol’s thigh; Sol freezes, baffled. Sol can feel his breath because it’s shaking his whole body, and it’s— it might be words, but Sol can’t understand what they are. He bends down to hear better, moving his hand on Kent’s back in what he hopes are soothing circles.

“Sorry,” Kent is saying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“Okay,” Pax says with forced briskness, striding out of the bathroom. “These should bring his fever down, assuming we can actually get him to— um.” Pax blinks down at Kent, shivering mostly in Sol’s lap, and for a second they look genuinely distressed. “Uh, okay, sit him up, I’m gonna see if I can get him to take these. Hold this.” Pax helps Sol pull Kent upright—though it isn’t hard, he’s limp as a ragdoll— and Sol gets sort of awkwardly behind him to hold him up, supporting the back of his head with one hand, and holding the glass of water Pax hands him with the other. “Kent,” Pax says. Sol’s brain is trying to squirrel away in a thousand directions so it notes that this is the first time Pax has said Kent’s actual name. “I’m gonna give you two of these, and I need you to swallow them, okay?”

Kent’s eyes open, finally, though they’re bright and reflective as glass, and he shakes his head, his hands opening and closing uselessly in his lap.

“I— Donn’ wwant—”

“Kent,” Sol says in his gentlest voice. “It’s medicine, baby, okay? Will you please take it?”

Kent swings his head unsteadily around to look at Sol. There are big full tears rolling down his cheeks and he looks like Sol has just ordered him in front of a firing squad; even knowing he’s telling the truth it’s a look that sinks in Sol’s stomach like lead. Then Kent looks back at Pax and finally nods miserably and opens his mouth.

Pax slips a tab of aspirin onto Kent’s tongue and Sol holds the glass up to his lips and Kent swallows obediently, closing his eyes and shuddering. By the time he’s swallowed the second one his silent tears have turned into big hiccupping sobs. Sol— hates this, maybe more than he’s ever hated anything his whole life.

“Jesus,” Pax says, getting shakily to his feet; it’s an understatement but one Sol thoroughly endorses. “I’m gonna run him a bath. Try to get him to finish that water.” They back away, running a hand through their hair, which is beginning to fall loose around their shoulders now. “Christ.”

Sol watches them trudge into the bathroom and kneel next to the tub, to give himself a second to take a deep breath. Kent hasn’t tried to move away, is still leaning against Sol’s side and crying great wracking sobs. Sol hesitates and then very carefully puts his hand under Kent’s chin and tips his head up so he isn’t hiding his face against Sol’s shirt anymore. Kent lets him, but his eyes are unfocused and he clearly isn’t seeing Sol.

“Kent,” Sol says. “Can you look at me, honey?”

Kent blinks slowly, his long eyelashes heavy with tears, and exhales, his brows pulling slowly into a confused frown, like he’s thinking very hard. “Wh...ere...?” he says in a small voice. “Don’t... I don’t— “

“Okay,” Pax calls from the bathroom. “The bath is ready. Do you need help getting him in?”

Kent goes completely rigid in Sol’s arms, his eyes flying wide; he stares forward toward Pax’s voice, his eyes still blank and unseeing. _“No,”_ he says, grabbing a handful of Sol’s jacket, his trembling turning into huge shudders running down his whole body. “No, please d— I can, I can be better, I won’t, I’m sorry, please don’t— “

“Kent,” Sol says, alarmed, “Kent, it’s fine, what’s— _Kent!”_

Kent turns back to Sol, desperate, still not seeing him. “I’m sorry,” he says, the words coming so fast Sol almost can’t understand them. “Chase, tell him, tell him I’m sorry, please don’t let him, Chase, please—”

He grabs for Sol’s arms and Sol lets him, searching his face for any shred of recognition, but there’s nothing. “Kent, that’s not— that’s not _me,_ baby, I don’t know who you’re—” Kent whines in the back of his throat, a horrible trapped-animal sound, and lets his head flop forward onto Sol’s chest. “Pax, what’s— what is he—?”

Pax, standing in the bathroom doorway, shakes his head helplessly. “I don’t— I don’t know. Just— here, get his shoulders and I’ll get his legs.”

 _“No,”_ Kent wails, and tries to pull back from Sol, but he’s so unsteady Sol has to grab him by the coat collar to keep him from falling off the bed. “No, fathe—father, _daddy, please,_ I’m _sorry—”_

“Kent, it’s okay, we’re not gonna hurt you,” Sol says desperately, but Pax just picks up Kent’s feet, ignoring his weak and uncoordinated attempts at shaking them off.

“He’s not hearing you,” they say grimly. “Best way we can help him is to get his fever down. Help me get him in the bathroom, at least, and we’ll—” They falter, and then square their shoulders and keep moving. “We’ll get his clothes off and cool him down.”

Kent thrashes in Sol’s grip but it’s distressingly easy to hold him. “God,” Sol moans. “Do we fucking have to, that’s— that’s—”

“You don’t want him in wet clothes, man,” Pax says. “Here— careful— lay him down here first. Help me with his coat.” Sol stares at Pax, feeling his own eyes burn. Pax looks at him, their face softening. “I know man. But you can apologize when he’s lucid.”

Kent doesn’t resist, and that’s— much worse, but it does mean that he’s in the bath within five incredibly terrible minutes, his head back and his eyes squeezed shut, every muscle visibly pulled as tight as it will go.

“For god’s sake, sunshine,” Pax says, leaning back against the side of the toilet. “The point is to calm you down. Take a deep fucking breath.”

“I’m sorry,” Kent whispers. “I’m sorry, I’ll— please don’t put my head under. Please don’t, daddy, I don’t think I can—”

Sol, kneeling next to the tub, grabs his hand where it’s dangling limply over the side of the tub, squeezes it in both of his. “Kent,” he says, horrified, “Kent, we’re not— we were never going to do that, Jesus Christ.” Kent squeezes weakly back.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank you, thank you, I won’t do it again I _promise,_ daddy, I promise.”

Sol holds onto Kent’s hand, not looking at Pax. The scars on Kent’s wrists reach halfway up to his elbow, one vertical line on each arm crossed with two horizontal ones. The adrenaline that’s been powering him through since they first came in the front door is running out and Sol lowers his head to rest against Kent’s hand, exhausted.

“We’re not gonna hurt you, baby,” he says, knowing Kent won’t hear him. He’ll say it again when Kent is in the room with him instead of whatever terrible place he’s lost in. “That’s a fucking promise.”


	14. Cottage (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One Big Bed!!! One Big Bed!!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter was the Hurt, this one is the Comfort.
> 
> TW in this chapter for: referenced abuse, references to accidental misgendering, negative self-talk, fever, references to self-harm/past suicide attempt. Also, Pax Moves A Corpse.

For the record, this is truly and deeply not what Pax signed up for.

Kent Graves falls asleep the second the lukewarm bath lowers his fever to a less deadly level, much to the relief of everyone involved, and Pax rummages through the dead man’s drawers to find a shirt and pants that might fit his long skinny body. When they looks back Sol is still crouched beside the bathtub, stroking Kent’s hair back from his face, and Pax... doesn’t want to mess with that, so they drop the pajamas on the lid of the toilet and scurry out to the front room, because they think they’ve been putting on a pretty good show of it, but they are not spending the night in a house with a dead body, _thank_ you.

The man is heavy-set; Pax doesn’t mess with the ruined top half of him and drags him out by his feet, going the extra mile to leave him in a heap behind the house so nobody will have to see him on the way out tomorrow. Pax leaves this duty with no extra blood anywhere except their shoes, which they leave at the door, but they do stop in the kitchen to wash their arms up to the elbows, just for... for peace-of-mind reasons.

Sol has Kent out of the bath and mostly-dry by the time they return to the master bathroom, and together it’s awkward but not hard to wrestle him into the dead man’s pajamas. Kent wakes during the process exactly enough to mutter what Pax assumes are unintelligible apologies, and Sol shushes him in a gentle voice every time. Sol doesn’t meet Pax’s eyes once during the entire process.

“I met him,” Sol says finally, while he’s giving Kent’s shoulder-length mess of blond hair a final towel dry.

“Met who?” Pax says tiredly, letting the water out of the tub.

“Kent’s dad.” Pax stops moving. “Kent winked at me, and he hit him.” Sol is looking at Pax now, out of the corner of his eye. “Slapped him, actually.”

That does sound like the sort of thing, sure. Pax opens their mouth to say so and then they realize why Sol is raising his eyebrows at them and pinch the bridge of their nose. “Fuck. Okay. Fine.” They sigh, looking down at Kent, who is propped up limply against the front of the toilet. He’s tall, but thin, and according to Sol, not heavy. “You take the first shower, kid, I’ll— tuck him in.”

Sol hovers, glaring at Pax as though reluctant to trust Kent in their presence. Pax rolls their eyes.

“I promise to be nice,” they say sarcastically. When Sol still hesitates, crouched in front of Kent like he wants to shield him with his body, Pax runs a hand through their hair and sighs heavily. “I get it, okay?” they say quietly. “But I’m too fucking exhausted to think about any of this right now, and so are you, so I will put sleeping beauty to bed, and you wake me up when you’re out of the shower, and we’ll come back to it at a more reasonable hour.”

Sol searches Pax’s face defensively for a full twenty seconds, but then he sags and nods tiredly, less like he’s agreeing to trust Pax and more like he’s too tired to argue, which is fair. Pax picks Kent up, carefully, and carries him on their hip like a baby. His long arms and legs make it awkward, but he really doesn’t weigh anything. He was too thin in the bath, too, all ribs and scars. Pax sighs. 

They’re cleaning their sword, halfway onto a different planet with the rhythmic motions of the oil rag down the blade, when Kent gasps suddenly behind them, flailing against the bedsheets, like... well, like anybody who wakes up in somebody else’s pajamas in a room they don’t recognize.

“Hey,” Pax says, sitting on the edge of the bed and pushing against Kent’s less-bruised shoulder when he tries to sit up. “Relax. Your fever’s a little lower, but don’t push it.”

Kent hears their voice and relaxes back against the pillow, breathing slightly hard.

Pax casts around for a question to ask— they’re not sure they know what day it is, and there’s no reason for Kent to know where he is right now. “Do you know who you’re with, kid?”

Kent pants slightly, and his eyes flutter open, still fever-bright. “‘m... sorry... for the trouble,” he mumbles. Pax sighs.

“Yeah, I thought you might say that,” they say. This time when they run their hand through their hair they pull it out of what’s left of the ponytail— the hairtie was in a knot at about the level of their elbows, anyway. “For what it’s worth,” they say, not looking at the bruises on Kent Graves’s face, “I’m sorry I hit you.”

Kent’s breath catches, and when Pax looks back at him he’s squinting up at them, like he’s trying to see through frosted glass. “...you’re not him,” he says, sounding surprised.

Pax laughs once. “No, I’m them,” they say, because it’s too obvious a joke to resist, and Kent’s face immediately twists and he raises a hand to rap hard against his forehead before Pax can stop him. 

“I should have— asked about that,” Kent mutters, his eyes still unfocused, and Pax has to grab his wrist to stop him hitting himself again. “I meant to ask Paxon about... I’m so _stupid...”_

“Okay, that’s enough,” Pax says, leaning over Kent so he can pin his wrists on either side of his head. “Ask me when you’re awake,” they say softly. “No use beating yourself up about it now.”

Kent’s eyelids flutter, and he looks up at Pax through his lashes. For the first time Pax thinks it’s possible he might actually be seeing them. “Are you... mad at me?” he whispers, his eyes wet, and Pax huffs out a breath that’s exactly between a laugh and a sigh.

“No, sunshine, I’m not mad.” They let go of one of Kent’s wrists so they’re not hovering overtop of him.. “Not that I’m letting you off the— hook—”

Kent chases their sleeve with his hand and clings to it like a little kid. “Please don’t—” he blinks slowly, and then flushes, and whispers. “Will you— will you stay, please?”

This is not in any way what they signed up for, Pax things as they pull the covers back.

——

The tub is small and stained, and the water pressure’s garbage, and Sol has never taken a better shower in his life. He emerges from the bathroom in his undershirt and boxers, he’s ready to order nobody to look at him on pain of death when he sees the bed and stops, eyebrows raising.

Kent is curled up with his face hidden in Paxon’s chest and both his hands in fists on the back of Pax’s shirt, sleeping peacefully. Paxon glares at Sol, their face suspiciously pink.

“Don’t say a word,” they growl, not moving from their position with their arm around Kent’s waist and their hand cupping the back of his head. “He whimpers every time I try to leave.”

Sol opens his mouth, and Paxon cuts him off with a hiss. _“Don’t— say— anything._ Just get in on the other side so I can take my fucking shower.”

Kent does, indeed, make some truly tragic noises when Pax sits up, but Pax’s expression when he pries Kent’s fingers off of his shirt is surprisingly soft, at least until they catch Sol looking. Then they roll their eyes and make an “all yours” gesture at Kent and stomp off toward the bathroom.

Kent is waking up, now, his breathing picking up and his brow wrinkling in distress, and Sol hesitates for a second— when was the last time he shared a bed with another person? Three years ago? _Five?_ — before Kent pulls in a gasping breath and tries to push himself up on his elbows, and Sol climbs in next to him, putting a hesitant hand on his arm.

Kent immediately grabs a handful of Sol’s tanktop and exhales, collapsing back against the bed like it’s a security blanket. Sol laughs softly, settling in next to him.

“Hey, buddy,” he says softly, reaching out to rest his hand on the top of Kent’s head; Kent sighs blissfully. “How ya feelin’?”

Kent blinks slowly, and turns his head to meet Sol’s eyes. “Sol... emn...?” he says sleepily, and Sol’s heart squeezes in his chest, not unpleasantly. 

“Just Sol is fine, y’know,” he says, finding himself smiling. He’s on his side, and Kent is on his back with one arm out to grab the hem of Sol’s shirt; there’s a good three inches between them—at least there is until Kent rolls over, burying his face in Sol’s chest and throwing a lanky arm over Sol’s side.

 _“Sol,”_ Kent sighs languidly. Sol feels himself go rigid from head to toe, and after a second Kent tenses too, and then scoots away, red-faced, putting a foot of space between them.

“I’m sorry,” Kent says in a horrified whisper. “I didn’t— I didn’t mean to—”

Sol grabs one of Kent’s flailing hands and pulls it in toward his heart. He feels fairly red in the face himself. “No, it’s— it’s fine. I’m just— it’s fine.” He looks at Kent, whose eyes are looking suspiciously wet again, and hears his terrible whispy fever-voice

_(please don’t put my head under daddy i don’t think i can)_

and he reaches forward slowly, telegraphing his movements as much as he can, to tuck an arm around Kent’s waist, and use the other hand to gather Kent back in under his chin. Kent clings to the back of Sol’s tank, breathing out shakily against Sol’s shoulder; Sol can feel Kent’s wet eyelashes brushing his collarbone.

He wants to ask. He wants Kent to tell him where he went when he was shaking with fever and accepting aspirin like it was arsenic. He wants to make Kent tell him who he thought Sol and Pax were so he can march back to the city and find them and make them sorry they ever so much as looked at him, let alone made him think he had to _beg_ like that; pull out three apologies for every one Kent mumbled with tears in his eyes.

“Kent,” he says softly instead. He feels the soft brush of Kent’s lashes as he opens his eyes, and Kent goes very still, which must mean he’s listening. “You don’t— have to say you’re sorry to me,” he says. He hears Kent suck in a breath, but that’s all. “I’m not— I won’t get mad if you do,” he says quickly. “I won’t get mad. But you don’t have to.” When Kent still doesn’t respond, Sol laughs quietly. “Did you catch any of that, K?”

“Chaucer,” Kent says very quietly. Sol thinks he must have misheard, and pulls back so he can see Kent’s face. Kent is blushing very hard.

“Huh?”

“Kenton is my middle name,” Kent says miserably, staring at Sol’s shirt instead of his face. “My first name is Chaucer. Chaucer Kenton Graves.”

Sol stares at him with his mouth open for about three heartbeats, and then he bursts out laughing, letting Kent hide his face back against his shoulder, wrapping his arm around Kent’s lanky torso and shaking with laughter.

“Qu— _Quite a name,”_ he manages after a second, “I said Solemn and _‘quite a name,’_ you said—”

“Uggh,” Kent moans against Sol’s shoulder, “don’t remind me, that was such a fucking stupid thing to say, I’m such an _asshole—”_

“Shut up,” Sol says, still laughing, and pushes Kent’s face into his shoulder, earning a satisfying sputter. “Shut up, _C.K.,_ I’m not mad at you.” He shakes his head, pulling himself together, but he knows he has a goofy smile on his face, still. “Why’d you tell me?” He puts a finger under Kent’s chin again, and Kent lets him guide his eyes back up, takes Sol’s smile with a deeping blush. “I’m— fucking— _delighted,_ but why’d you bring it up, Kent?”

It takes Kent a second to meet his eyes. He looks miserably embarrassed, but not unhappy. “I— wanted you to know,” he says quietly, still flushing. “I wanted— _somebody_ to know, I guess. Before—” He looks away, and then massages one of his wrists with the other hand, apparently unconsciously. 

There’s no sudden turn, where Sol’s amusement dissolves and he feels guilty it was ever there. It’s more like it pivots into something else, something equally warm but harder to identify. He pulls Kent’s hand gently away to replace it with his own, runs his thumb down the long vertical scar on Kent’s thin wrist. 

“Thank you,” he says softly, and Kent stops fidgeting in surprise. “For telling me. Kent?”

Kent looks at him, his eyes wide and silvery in the dark bedroom. 

“I’m glad you’re with me,” Sol says softly, and Kent breathes in, his eyes filling with tears, winding up for a horrified protest.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Pax says, amused, and Sol jumps and blinks up at them over Kent’s shoulder, “but budge over, Sunshine, I’m fucking exhausted.”

Pax climbs in behind Kent and swings a loose arm over Kent’s shoulder, their hand dangling in the gap between Kent and Sol’s chest. Sol laughs softly and scoots closer, warm and sleepy, and rests his hand on Kent’s side. He can feel that Kent is still warmer than he should be, but nowhere near the blazing dry heat from an hour ago. Sol closes his eyes.

It’s been an extremely long and terrible day. Sol only half hears Kent’s whisper against his shoulder: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”


	15. Interlude: Police Station

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Apocalypse Trio has left some loose ends. Let's see what they've been up to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reasonable Question: Why Are There No Ladies In Café?  
> Answer: There are, they’re just too competent to make decent whumpees.
> 
> TW for: cops, poor gun safety practices, city-wide crisis with patterns of contagion that reads different in April 2020 than it does when I planned this story fuckin’ six years ago.

**Day 1**

Officer Andrea Santos listens to the steady beat of the heart rate monitor and tries to slow her own heart to match it. On the bright side, she no longer feels close to tears. She’s going to consider that a victory. There have been few enough of those today.

Andrea pulls at a few loose strands of her hair— at some point during this long, awful day, it came halfway out of its braid, and now it’s matted with sweat and blood. She’s had a chance to wash her face and tape over her more obvious cuts and scrapes, but not to actually shower. The force is stretched far too thin for her to go home now, even if she had a cruiser to go home in.

“So you’d better get on your feet fast,” she says softly, giving Ben’s hand a squeeze. “No excuse for sleeping on the job, partner.”

At the sound of a very awkward throat-clearing form the doorway, Andrea straightens hastily and snatches her hand away.

Monique looks honestly sympathetic for a second before her face settles into a more familiar deadpan expression. “You god in here, Drea? We could use you in the briefing room.”

Andrea stands, trying to brush off some of the dirt clinging to her uniform. It doesn’t really work. She tosses her head. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

Her boss is seated at one of the briefing room desks with a map of the city in front of him and probably his seventh cup of coffee in his hand. He looks up at her as she enters, his worry-creased face immediately softening.

That’s bad. She can handle Monique’s guarded pity, if only because it looks so strange and uncomfortable on her face that it’s almost funny. But any show of sympathy from Greg Halstrom is going to crumble her resolve immediately and they don’t have time for her to cry on him.

“I’m sorry, Andrea,” Halstrom says, and he sounds like he means it, goddammit. “I wish we had more time to give you space.”

“Well, we don’t,” she snaps, and plops down across from him. “Did I miss any game-changing revelations?”

Monique huffs. “You wish. We still don’t know a goddamn thing.”

Halstrom turns his map so she can read it. “Here’s the best we can figure so far. There were six initial points of attack, that we know of.” He taps the map. Six locations throughout the city have been circled in red ink. She spots the café, near the center, and glares at it. “Two resulted in no survivors at all, so once the original assailants were killed, those were pretty much dealt with.” Halstrom leans forward, a green pen in his hand, and crosses out an antiques store on fourth street and a Subway on ninth. “The attacks on more crowded places—” Two of the remaining circles mark the public library and a major city park, and Andrea doesn’t want to think about how many people must’ve been involved in those. “Well, there was basically no way for us to have kept track of all the survivors,” Halstrom concludes, frowning down at the map. “We’re stretched thin as it is. The hospital is pretty much a lost cause— too many of them ended up there.”

Andrea clenches her fists and doesn’t think of Ben, in his makeshift hospital bed, kept alive by contraband equipment. “Yeah,” she says grimly, “I caught that. Hold on, though.” She frowns up at Halstrom. “You keep saying ‘attack,’ ‘attack point.’ Do we think these were— coordinated, somehow?”

Halstrom and Monique exchange an uncomfortable look.

“That’s hard to say,” Halstrom hedges.

“It’d be a hell of a coincidence for six of these crazies to show up at once, though,” Monique says, and she’s right. Andrea’s stomach turns. What does that _mean?_

“Goddammit,” Andrea mutters, slamming one of her hands down on the table. _“Somebody_ knows what’s going on in this city.”

Halstrom frowns at her, his face going soft and sympathetic again, and then he frowns down at the map. There are deep dark circles around his eyes— she wonders how long it’s been since he last slept. Since any of them have.

“We don’t know that, Andrea,” he says in a low, frustrated voice. “Who knows if all this is what anybody wanted, even if the initial attacks were planned. Even if somebody meant for this to happen, they’d have to be idiots to be in the city when it did, and we can’t leave now.” He looks at her, and then drops a big warm hand onto her shoulder. He’s probably trying to give her a reassuring look; she glares down at the map because she has to. “The best we can do now is try to keep as many people alive as we can.”

Melody clenches and unclenches her hands on the edge of the table. Of course she wants to keep people alive— but at the moment, she thinks she’ll settle for killing some fucking bleeders.

——

**Day 2**

She shifts Harrison Krieger’s weight on her shoulders, and growls at the necessity. He’s bleeding badly from under his hairline, but he’s also breathing, so his master probably won’t be happy with her if she leaves him to die.

At the moment she would love almost literally nothing more than to do just that.

The old man will be unhappy enough as it is— he never trusted Paxon Field, much, but there’s no denying that they were a very useful asset, and it’ll be tricky to explain why she let them wander off without trying harder to stop them. Hopefully she’ll be able to make it Harri’s fault. Which it is, come to that.

She shifts his weight again, shaking her hair out of her face. Best case she’ll get the call soon, and be able to give up this whole nasty business. It had better be soon, before she goes fucking feral and joins God’s Hammer for real.

“Hold it!” a girl’s voice calls suddenly. She freezes. “You stay right where you are, lady!”

This seems like as good an excuse as any— she drops Harrison like a sack of potatoes and sprints across the street, sliding in through the broken front window of an antique store and crouching under the window ledge to draw her gun, fleet-footed as a fox.

She hears three gunshots while she runs, but she must move faster than her pursuers expect, because all three fly hopelessly wide.

Under the window ledge, she waits.

 _“Andrea!”_ a man’s voice shouts from just outside her field of vision. “For god’s sake, you can’t just run around shooting at people, okay?”

She shifts sideways, so she can see her pursuers: a middle-aged blonde man and a young woman. The woman has bandages wrapped around her head; she marks this down in her mental assets column.

They’re both in dark blue uniforms she recognizes belatedly— it has been a very long day— as those worn by the city police.

Oh. Hm.

The man pokes at Harrison’s body with the toe of his boot. “She just dropped him,” he says, sounding bewildered. He isn’t shouting anymore, but with no car noise for blocks, she doesn’t have to strain much to hear him. 

“Is he dead?” the woman says, sounding alarmed. Sounds like the police have at least some knowledge of the bleeders, then. That’s— good, she guesses.

“I, uh, don’t think so.” The man hesitates, then squares his shoulders and kneels to check Harri’s pulse, his hand on his gun.

She rolls her eyes. Good thing Harri _isn’t_ bit— there’s no way the man is fast enough to avoid him if he’s just playing dead.

“No, his pulse seems normal,” the man says, sounding relieved. He straightens, frowning down at Harri, and then around at the surrounding buildings. His eyes pass over her storefront without so much as a second glance, so she thanks god for his apparently shitty vision. It seems like too much to hope that the woman didn’t see her enter this store, though. She wonders if there’s a back exit. 

“Should we— take him in, then?” the woman asks uncertainly. 

Shit.

“I guess so— for his own safety, if nothing else. Think we can carry him, between the two of us?”

 _Shit._ It’s probably too late to try and kill Harri now, but she really can’t let him get taken alive, then his master _will_ really think she’s incompetent or a traitor, and all her months of hard work will be for nothing.

“Not without making ourselves vulnerable,” the woman is saying, tugging at her long braid thoughtfully, and at that point she stands from her crouch and steps carefully over the window ledge, her pistol drawn.

“Don’t move, either of you,” she says flatly, and while the man obeys her orders, only laying a hand on his gun, the woman draws her gun and trains it on the center of her forehead. Under other circumstances she might be impressed by the girl’s speed, but at the moment she’s just annoyed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she hisses. “I didn’t want to do it this way, dammit.” Reluctantly, she puts her gun back in its holster on her thigh.

The man and the woman both stare at her.

“Look,” she says, planting a hand on her hip, and points at Harri’s prone form. “Will you just give him back to me, please? I need him.”

The officers blink again, in unison.

The man recovers first. “Uh,” he says, a confused smile finding its way onto his handsome face. “What? Why would we do that?”

She sighs. “Because we’re on the same side.” Shaking her hair out of her face, she takes two steps forward— the woman conspicuously follows her progress with her gun— to offer the man her hand, since he seems to be the one in charge. Or she hopes he is, anyway. “My name is Medea,” she says, lifting her chin. “I’m with Interpol. I’m an agent.”

The man blinks at her hand, and then takes it in his and shakes once, though the woman makes a disbelieving squawking noise. “Greg Halstrom, Police Captain. I— would like to believe you,” he says, and while his voice is polite it is also very clear that he doesn’t.

“Well, you should,” Medea says, a trifle coldly. She misses her badge. This undercover bullshit is more trouble than it’s worth. “It’s the truth. I have been infiltrating the terrorist organization known as God’s Hammer for almost six months now, and that man—” Releasing Greg Halstrom’s hand, she points at where Harri is still lying face-down on the asphalt— “is crucial to maintaining my cover. As an agent of the International Criminal Police Organization, my authority exceeds yours, and I order you to relinquish custody of this criminal to me.”

Crossing her arms, she waits and hopes they’re dumb enough to believe her. It’s the truth, much as she wishes it wasn’t, but she doesn’t, she’s painfully aware, actually have any _proof._

“Um,” says Captain Halstrom, looking very uncomfortable.

“What are you looking so conflicted for, old man?” the woman snaps. “Of course we won’t do that!”

Medea glares at her. Her gun still drawn, the woman stands her ground and glares back.

“Ah— she’s right, I’m afraid, ma’am,” Halstrom says, looking, if possible, even more uncomfortable. “We can’t let you run off with this man if we don’t know what your intentions are. But— you’re welcome to come down to the station with us.” He puts a little extra weight on the word ‘welcome,’ and Medea is well aware that he’s only framing his order as a request for courtesy’s sake.

Medea pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. On the downside, this is a hell of a setback. On the up, there might be showers at the police station.

Straightening, she tosses her head. “Alright, that sounds like a fair deal,” she says, just a few slivers of ice in her voice, and the look of disappointment on the woman’s face is almost as rewarding as the man’s relieved smile.

——

Day 3

“You can’t be fucking serious,” Andrea snaps, gesturing at the mess of red on the map. “If he has a _brain,_ the leader of God’s Hammer’d kill you on sight by now!”

Medea glares at her. “Has it occurred that maybe I, an expert, know what to expect from a gang leader than an untrained twenty-something—”

“Uh, guys?” Monique says from the doorway, and quails slightly when everyone snaps their heads around to look at her—Andrea furious, Medea impatient, and Halstrom deeply relieved. “There’s, um— there’s somebody here to see us?”

Andrea exchanges a baffled look with Halstrom— after two days of phone calls ending in screaming, the neighborhood hasn’t been calling the police, let alone coming to the station. Andrea gets to her feet, and they all follow Monique back to the front desk.

Andrea doesn’t know what she’s expecting. It isn’t— fucking— _Gossip Girl._

The girl is looking out the doors at the empty street when they crowd back into the reception area, and then she turns, and Andrea half expects to see cameras flashing. She looks like she should come with her own paparazzi. As it is she’s flanked by two big out of breath men in suits, holding guns, and they take up positions on either side of the door like trained dogs.

Andrea watches the girl look Halstrom up and down, and then she strides up to the desk. Andrea can’t see her feet, but she can hear that she’s wearing stilettos, and the collar of her coat looks like actual fur.

“I’m here to report a missing person,” Gossip Girl says, and Andrea is surprised when she sees her eyes— they’re narrowed in determination, sharp as flint.

Halstrom is staring at the girl like she’s got two heads— or like she’s got perfectly straightened hair during the apocalypse, possibly— so Andrea’s the one who speaks up. “You fucking what?” she says, eloquently, and Gossip Girl narrows her eyes further. 

“My fiance,” Gossip Girl says, with all the confidence of a person who can afford bodyguards in the apocalypse. “He was downtown with his father on April tenth, two days ago, and he was left there.” She says this last part with her perfect white teeth bared, anger directed somewhere outside the room. “I haven’t heard from him since. I want to know where he is.”

Halstrom is still staring at her, eyebrows raised. Medea has a strange look on her face, and is hovering in the doorway like she doesn’t want to be seen. Andrea takes the initiative again.

“He’s a fucking zombie, lady,” she says, too confused and annoyed to sound sympathetic. Gossip Girl turns her ice-shard eyes on Andrea, and Andrea almost takes a step back.

“I’m aware of the possibility,” Gossip Girl says, standing there in her fur coat, with her unstained unwrinkled dress and her stilettos. “I still want him found. If he’s fallen ill, I’ll take him to my father’s doctors, and he’ll no longer be your responsibility.”

“He isn’t our responsibility now,” Andrea snarls. “Listen, lady, we don’t have time or bodies to run around after some rich asshole during the end of the—”

“I thought you might say that,” Gossip Girl says. “Therefore, I’m prepared to offer you access to my father’s resources and laboratories in exchange for finding my fiance.”

“Your, uh,” Halstrom says, sounding very lost. “Who exactly is your...”

“I can answer that,” Medea says with apparent reluctance. Gossip Girl looks over Andrea’s shoulder and spots Medea, and does a serious double take. “Captain, this is Sophia Rinaldi, only daughter of Albrecht Rinaldi.” Andrea stares over her shoulder at Medea, who is leaning in the doorway looking slightly uncomfortable. “Leader of God’s Hammer.”

All three officers stare at Gossip Girl. The buzz of the fluorescent lights is the only sound in the station for about two minutes.

“Hello, Media,” Sophia Rinaldi says acidly at Medea, who waves ironically at her. “Actually I think you’ll find my father is a respected entrepreneur and philanthropist.”

“Who funds every violent crime in the city,” Halstrom offers with a bewildered smile. “I’m not sure we want the kind of help your father is offering, Miss Rinaldi.”

“My father isn’t offering it,” Sophia says, and she looks at Halstrom, beautiful and apparently sincere; Andrea pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. “Listen to me, officer. His father just— just left him out there, during all of this. I’m not going to do the same. If he’s alive, I want him safe. If he’s— unwell, my father has the best labs in the city. If he’s—” she falters for the first time, her hand tightening into a fist on the fur collar of her coat, but then she swallows and raises her perfect pointed chin. “If he’s dead, I will recover his body. I am willing to assist your officers in exchange for their expertise. That’s the deal, sir.”

She holds Halstrom’s gaze, which means Andrea gets to watch him crumble in real time. The old man sighs, running a hand through his hair, which has gone more gray at the temples in the past three days than in the five years he’s been her captain.

“God. Who exactly are we looking for?” he says finally, defeated, and Sophia Rinaldi blazes with triumph, reaching into her fur coat for a glossy photograph which she slams on the counter.

Andrea looks at the guileless blue eyes and the overlong, neatly styled hair.

“Oh, what the fuck,” she says, and hears Medea saying the same thing beside her.


	16. Cottage (Part 3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent is the only one who remembers anything the little girl said, apparently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: suicidal ideation; spiraling; self-hate; guns; hostage situation; vomiting; mucus; referenced minor character death.
> 
> Just a lil one this time because i'm Tired.

Kent Graves wakes up not knowing where he is or how he got there but very much knowing that if he doesn’t start running now he’s not going to make it to the bathroom before he throws up. 

He stumbles straight over the end of the bed and falls fully on the floor, and never gets fully upright before he collapses over the toilet and heaves, bringing up nothing except horrible green slime that feels so disgusting coming up his throat that he’d gag even if he wasn’t already puking. The retching turns into coughing halfway through, and without even fully remembering why he grips the edge of the toilet and tries to muffle the coughs with his hand, terrified that he’ll wake his father.

Except his father isn’t… here. At least Kent is… fairly confident that he isn’t. Wherever ‘here’ is.

Kent rests his forehead against the cool front of the toilet and wraps an arm around his ribs, which feel— sharp and jagged and terrible. He feels like he’s run a marathon instead of stumbled into a strange bathroom. He feels like his head is full of cotton and his lungs are full of water.

Sol said he was _happy_ to be _with_ him. 

Kent stumbles to his feet, dragging himself up using the toilet and the side of the tub, feeling his heart pounding in his ears.

He knew it was wrong all along. Knew from the second Sol offered to come that he was taking advantage of Sol’s kindness, that he was leading Sol into danger for absolutely no reason, but— but the idea that he’s lied to Sol so much that Sol can— can look at him like that and speak to him so softly is— 

It’s the worst thing he’s ever done. There’s— there’s just no way to atone for it. Sol doesn’t want him to say he’s sorry; Sol wants to believe the best of people, so it would only hurt him more to tell the truth now, that wouldn’t— 

There’s nothing in the bathroom cabinet but antacid tabs and toothpaste stains, nothing that will help him. He stumbles back out into the bedroom, and freezes. There’s a shaft of moonlight falling on the bed, slashed into bars by the window-blinds, and it falls across Paxon, spread out on their back with the covers kicked off, and across Sol, sleeping on his side with his hand stretched out toward the empty spot Kent woke up in. The light washes out all the colors, turns Pax’s hair the color of dark wine and Sol’s swollen wrist black.

Kent has to get out of here. He has to— maybe the kitchen will have something he can—

Kent stumbles into the hallway, and for a long moment the glint of moonlight on metal totally fails to resolve into anything recognizable in his head, and then his eyes adjust to the darkness of the hallway and his mind goes totally blank.

There is a little girl standing in the darkened hallway, and she is pointing a shotgun at the center of Kent’s chest.

“Who the hell are you,” she says in a voice that is all teeth, “and what have you done with my little sister.”

——

It’s colder than it should be, and Sol flexes his hand and knows immediately why: Kent is not in the bed.

Sol sits up too quickly; everything goes TV-static fuzzy for a second, and then he— 

He hears whispered voices, and one of them is new.

Pax is sprawled next to him, taking up half the bed, and Sol whacks their arm several times, staring out into the hallway, where he can hear two voices— one is Kent, speaking in a low breathless voice that immediately rings every alarm bell in Sol’s head, and one a low hissing whisper his brain is scrambling to identify.

“Mmmufuck…?” Pax mumbles, sitting up, their hair an absolute ridiculous cloud Sol desperately wishes he had time to make fun of.

“— the fuck, how many of you are there?” the new voice hisses, and Sol hears Kent, his voice unsteady and confused, mumbling excuses or reassurances, and then he makes a surprised yelp, and Sol is already tumbling out of bed.

“You all better get your asses out here or I’ll blow your buddy’s fucking head off,” a girl’s voice yells from the hallway, and Sol fights his way to upright, kicking off the sheets that have tangled around his feet.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Pax mutters, scrambling for the pile where they’ve left their satchel and their sword.

“You’ve got three seconds,” the voice shrills. “One— _Two—”_

“Fucking— _wait!”_ Sol howls at her, and he sprints out into the hallway in his tank top and boxers.

The hallway opens out into the living room, where the dead man was, so the minute Sol leaves the bedroom he can see Kent, kneeling at the end of the hall with his hands behind his head. The figure standing behind him is small, only a head taller standing up than Kent is on his knees, with a rat’s nest of long brown hair sticking out from under the hood of her coat, and— 

Little girl. Brown hair.

Pax sucks air through their teeth and says softly, _“Fuck.”_

Most of the girl’s face is obscured between the hood, the ratty tangle of hair, and a scarf or bandanna or something pulled up over her mouth; her eyes are just an angry glitter inside her hood; the shotgun she is holding is way too big for her; its muzzle is pressed against the back of Kent’s head.

Kent is blinking slowly, his shoulders moving like it’s taking him some effort to breathe.

“Who are you and where’s Leah,” the girl says. “Don’t lie or I’ll shoot him.”

Pax’s sword is in their hand; they don’t move to use it, thank god. “The house was empty when we got here,” they say flatly. “Except for the dead guy, I guess. You do that?” they say, fucking unbelievably, “Blow your dad’s head off with his own gun?”

 _“Pax,”_ Sol says. He’s already raised his hands. Pax’s are at their sides, twitching, like they think this is a shootout, like that ends any other way than with Kent’s brains all over the floor.

Sol can’t— Sol _can’t._ That _isn’t going to happen._

“Look,” Sol says, even though he doesn’t know what’s gonna come out after that— Kent was good at this before, why didn’t Kent talk to her, _why isn’t Kent saying anything._ “We just wanted to get out of the rain, we didn’t—”

The girl points the gun straight up into the ceiling and fires it. The noise is deafening. _“Where is my sister?”_ she screams.

When nobody answers, she yanks Kent backwards by his shirt collar and jams the gun against his head, Sol says, _“Don’t, don’t hurt him—”_ and Pax takes two careful steps away from Sol and says, voice totally calm, 

“I killed her.”

The little girl freezes. Kent, on the ground, bends forward a little, wrapping a hand around his stomach, his mouth slightly open. Pax looks the little girl straight in the face.

“We met her out by the road.” They point generally in the way they came, half a lifetime ago. “One of the bleeders bit her. I bet you already know that.”

The little girl stares at Pax, breathing hard. “No,” she says quietly. “No, I— she wouldn’t—”

“You saw it happen to your dad, didn’t you?” Pax is staring at the girl, all their focus on her, but they’re also inching sideways— not towards her, but away from Sol, like— 

Like they don’t want her to hit Sol if she tries to shoot them.

“He went nuts, and he bit her. Didn’t he?” Pax stares at the little girl, their hands up, not moving anymore. “Didn’t he, kid?”

“You,” the little girl whispers, in a shaky voice, and she raises the gun so it’s pointing at Pax’s head, not Kent’s. Pax stares at her, their eyes glittering. “You killed my little sister, you— _you—”_

“Sam.”

The little girl freezes, shooting bolt upright.

“That is you, isn’t it? You’re Sam.” Kent turns slightly, still on his knees, and looks up at her. “We wanted to save her,” he whispers. “We all wanted to save her so badly. She was good, and she wanted to be good, but it wasn’t enough,” he says. He blinks, and Sol can see a single tear drop hover on his lower lashes and then fall down his cheek. Kent always looks like he’s in a movie. The little girl is lowering her gun. “We’re so sorry, Sam,” Kent says softly, and the barrel of the gun dips down low enough to thunk against the carpet. The little girl stumbles back against the front door, her lip trembling, and then she drops the gun altogether and covers her face with her hands.

Kent reaches out a hand towards her, and then takes it back to cover the horrible wet coughs now shaking his whole skinny body. When he pulls his fist away from his mouth, there’s blood on it.


	17. Cottage/Car Ride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pax reacts quickest. For better or worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: gun violence, blood/gore, guilt/self-loathing.

The worst thing in the world, Sol is discovering, is when you can see the disaster happening like it’s in slow motion, and you’re just too slow to stop it.

Kent’s face runs through the whole gamut of emotion when he lowers his bloody hand from his mouth: mild disgust into worry into realization and then he looks up at the little girl, Sam, who is maybe thirteen and doesn’t have time for any look on her face other than fear which is all it takes for her to dive for the shotgun and point it at Kent’s face.

Sol has been waiting tables for six months now. Before that he did some scurrying around the streets of the city, avoiding trouble, but that’s what he’s good at, _avoiding;_ he’s never _been in a gunfight_ before. The only guns he’s ever seen in real life are the two he’s seen in the past however many days since the real world ended.

So he sees the gun moving and he freezes. Just for a second.

Pax gets there much faster. Sol doesn’t even really see them move, because he’s frozen by the knowledge that he’s about to see Kent Graves die.

The shotgun going off is the actual loudest sound Sol has ever heard. Pax grabs ahold of the barrel to yank it away from Kent’s face which means the shot hits their shoulder at absolutely point-blank range, and they spin backward onto the floor in an explosion of blood.

That’s what unsticks Sol’s muscles, finally. He runs forward, drops to his knees next to Paxon, who has curled into a ball, clutching the bloody mess of their shoulder, their eyes wide, their mouth opening and closing like a gutted fish.

“Oh, god,” Sol hears Kent say, and the little girl says, “I—I—I—didn’t, I—I wasn’t even—I wasn’t—”

Sol doesn’t dignify any of that with a response, doesn’t even really see the stricken expression on her face, just reaches forward to yank the too-big gun out of her relaxing grip and without looking throw it over his shoulder toward the hallway as hard as he can.

“He’s not bit,” he snaps at her, already turning back to Pax and the blood pulsing out of his shoulder in a spreading pool on the dirty carpet. “He’s sick. He was sick before you _pointed a gun_ at him.”

He leans over Pax, and knocks their hand out of the way to press his own over the wound. It’s— it’s bad, he can feel sharp things that must be bone, but it’s essentially a very terrible graze, not an actual hit, which he hopes is better.

“I didn’t,” the girl is muttering, still leaning against the door, doing absolutely nothing useful, “I, how was I supposed to know that, this isn’t—”

There’s a lot of blood, too much, squeezing through Sol’s fingers; he presses down harder on Pax’s shoulder, feels something shift under his hand. Pax makes a horrible wounded-animal noise; Sol feels very nauseous but muscles past it.

“I need— something to bandage it with,” he says. The hand he isn’t using to hold Pax’s arm on sort of hovers at the hem of his shirt; in a different world he’d take it off and use it, but—

“Here,” Kent says desperately, already tugging his borrowed shirt off over his head, sounding almost relieved. “Here, take this, here.” He presses it into Sol’s free hand; the cloth is warm from his still-too-high body temperature, and Sol feels a moment of complete panic; Kent is dying of fever and Pax has just had his arm blown off, and Sol is _alone._

“Wait,” the little girl says, and she crawls forward into his space, taking the t-shirt from him. “Wait, I can— I know how to do this.” And she pushes Sol’s hand away from the wound, her lips pressing into a thin white line at the sight of it, and winds the shirt around their shoulder, tight, pulling it into a messy but serviceable knot.

“Fuck,” Pax says when she pulls it tight, with a full-body wince. They roll onto their back, slamming their opposite fist into the carpet, arching their spine. _“Fuck_ that hurts!”

The little girl stares at them, then up at Sol, the set of her shoulders somewhere between defensive and expecting-a-slap.

“I,” she says, and then she takes a deep breath and meets Sol’s eyes firmly. “There’s—there’s a clinic a few miles up from here. I bet it’s not still open, but there might be— stuff to take. Real bandages at least.” She glares at Sol, and then at Kent, who is breathing hard, staring straight ahead like he’s on a different planet. “If you swear— If you _swear_ to me you’re not bit. Hey.” She reaches forward, and shoves Kent once on the chest; it doesn’t look like a hard push, but he jumps hard, his eyes refocusing with a truly worrying amount of effort. “If you killed my sister and now you’re hiding a bite, I’m going to kill you, all of you, I swear to god.”

Kent looks at her with his blue eyes reflective as glass, and then slowly shakes his head and croaks, “No. No, I haven’t been bitten.”

She nods, apparently satisfied. “Then you can use my dad’s car, I guess. I’ll get the keys.”

——

It’s a soft-top jeep, because of course it is; Sol’s always kind of liked the look of them, before zombies ripping through the roof and eating him was a concern.

Sam is thirteen, which Sol hates, but tall for her age and wiry, and Kent is apparently either too feverish or too _Kent_ to protest her swinging his arm over her shoulder and supporting him on his way out to the car. Which leaves Sol half-carrying Pax, avoiding the mess of their shoulder as best he can; they’re already gray with pain that clearly gets worse with the slightest shift of their left arm. Who knows when they’ll be using their sword again.

“My duffle’s in the bedroom,” they mutter through gritted teeth as Sol supports them out to the carport. “Don’t— I’m not leaving it.”

Sol sighs. “Fine. Yeah.” Getting Pax in the backseat is a terrible operation; their shoulder shifts once and they make a noise Sol is going to remember until the day he dies, and Sol is almost grateful for the opportunity to scurry back and grab their duffle from the bedroom. He tosses their horrible pink jacket on top of the bag too and slings their sword over his shoulder, and on the way back he pauses and, hating every second, picks up the gun from the hallway floor, carrying it by the end of its stock like it’s a dirty diaper.

Sol didn’t have a strong opinion on guns one way or the other a week ago. Those were the fuckin days.

——

Pax has experienced many injuries in their life, but this is actually their first shotgun blast. 

It is not the most fun they have ever had.

The bright side is, it’s pretty clear none of their vital organs are involved; the downside is that as a result they are very much still awake by the time Sol has finished arranging them on the back seat with jittery hands, on their back with their useless arm dangerously close to the edge of the seat and their head in Kent’s lap.

“Sunshine,” they say, and Kent looks down at them, with an expression that makes it clear that he’s about to start saying very stupid things. “Don’t let my arm— fall off the seat, or it’ll strain the joint. And if you say ‘sorry’ one single time, I— will kill you.”

Kent blinks down at them, his pretty face even more tragic than usual, and rearranges Pax in his lap so he can hold their arm in place. He’s shaking, but not hard enough to jostle Pax too badly— if anything, it just feels like the car is already running.

“You didn’t— have to do that,” Kent says in a quiet, horrified voice.

Pax reaches up with the hand it doesn’t hurt to move, and then realizes they have no idea what to do with it. They grab a lock of Kent’s sweaty hair and give it a light tug.

“Shut up,” they say, and they stick their tongue out at him.

At this point the front passenger door opens, and the little girl who shot them climbs into the passenger seat. Pax meets her eyes in the mirror, and makes sure to give her an unimpressed look. She glares at them, and then looks away. 

“Wouldn’t mind— a sorry— from _you,”_ they point out, and have time for her to look back in the mirror at them defensively before the sound of the trunk slamming shut startles them all and makes Pax jump in a way they immediately regret. “Fuck me,” they mutter, and Kent slides a shaky hand into their hair in a way that will fuck up the curl pattern but does, admittedly, feel pretty good.

“Okay,” Sol says, sliding into the driver’s seat and running his hands over the wheel with transparent nervousness. “Where the fuck are we going, kid?”

“I’ll give you directions,” the girl says tersely, and Sol starts the engine. Pax squeezes their eyes shut, and keeps it together.

——

Pax jolts in his arms every time the car hits a bump. By the end of the ride their teeth are visibly clenched together and they’re covered in sweat. 

Kent isn’t thinking very clearly. His skin feels tight across his face, and his hands feel like they’re— in a different room, or attached to someone else’s body. 

Which isn’t nearly enough. There isn’t— there just isn’t anything he can do that will make this right.

Kent almost wishes his father were here. He’s the only one who might be able to come up with a fair price for him to pay.


	18. Clinic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pax gets carried. Kent gets held. Sol catches his breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: self-loathing, needles, poor gun safety practices.
> 
> I did some cursory research but i'm also an idiot so please forgive any glaring medical inaccuracies

Sol has lived in the suburbs and he’s lived in the city, but apparently this here is the actual sticks, because he’s never seen a clinic like this one. It’s obviously just an old house that’s been converted, with a sign on the lawn that says “O’Brian Polyclinic.” He doesn’t know what that means exactly, but he does know that there’s a big handwritten sign on the door that says “CLOSED,” and though it’s a pretty big house only a single light is on, on the first floor, near the door.

Sol rolls the Jeep to a stop and looks up at the clinic, chewing his lip.

“This is the closest place,” Sam says beside him in a low voice. “You’d have to go into town to go to a regular doctor and the hospital’s even farther than that.”

Sol turns in his seat. Pax has their eyes squeezed shut and their jaw clenched. Kent is carding a hand through their mess of fire-engine curls; he gives Sol a scared look and doesn’t say anything.

“Okay,” Sol says, and gets out of the car.

“Wait, I’ll— I’ll come with you,” Sam says, scrambling down out of the Jeep and trailing Sol up onto the porch. 

Sol raps on the outer screen door, loud. The single light is either in the same room as the door or the next room over, so it should be easy to hear. When no one comes to the door, he knocks again, harder. Then he hammers on the door, not stopping, and yells, “Hey! Is anybody in there? We need help!”

After almost a minute of pounding, a scratchy voice calls from inside, “Yeah, we all need help these days. Fuck off.”

Sol blinks, and looks down at Sam, who is fidgeting next to him in a way that looks, frankly, guilty. 

“We— I at least need bandages, man,” Sol says, which isn’t even true, they probably need fucking antibiotics at the very least, but he’s got Pax’s blood all over his hands and that’s kind of all he can think about. “Just— will you at least take a look?”

“Can’t you read?” the voice says, not a step closer than before. “We’re closed.”

Sol glares at the door. Then he glares down at Sam, too, for good measure. “You got any bright ideas, or are you just here for fucking—moral support?”

Sam bites her lip in a way that Sol finds kind of worrying, not meeting his eyes. 

“Dr. O’Brien?” she calls after a second, sounding highly reluctant. “It’s, um—I-it’s Samantha Rochester. I—There’s been an accident.”

Sol raises his eyebrows at her. Oh, there’s _been an accident,_ has there?

The inside door opens. 

Through the screen door Sol can see— a cartoon hillbilly, basically, or a sheriff from an old Western. He doesn’t have a cowboy hat on but he does have comically broad shoulders and a huge fluffy mustache, and also a tumbler of brown liquid in his hand.

“A Rochester,” the Sheriff says, looking down at Sam and not even really seeing Sol next to her. “Even more my pleasure to say this, then, kid: fuck off.” And he slams the door so hard the windows shake.

“What the fuck,” Sol says.

“Dr. O’Brien went to high school with my dad,” Sam says in a small voice.

Sol realizes this is the angriest he’s ever been. He feels himself turn around and start marching back toward the Jeep without even fully deciding to do so, and he doesn’t try to stop.

——

Russ O’Brien is just settling back down in his chair to really savor this awful bathtub-grade whisky, when Dan Rochester’s daughter hammers on the door again, and he slams the tumbler down and gets to his feet, ready to tell her exactly what she can do with her little “accident.”

When he yanks the door open this time there is a shotgun pointed at his face.

Russ didn’t even really see the guy before. He’s short, dark-haired, and clearly furious. The screen door is the only thing between Russ and the barrel of the gun the guy is holding. The Rochester girl is hovering over his shoulder, looking almost embarrassed.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” the guy says in a low, dangerous voice. “My friends are in the car. One of them has a shoulder wound. It’s bad. I think the other one’s got an infection. No,” he says over Russ’s immediate objection, “he isn’t _bitten._ If you’re a doctor, you’re going to help them.” The guy pumps the shotgun. He looks like he only kind of knows how to do it, and like he means every word he’s saying, which is the worst kind of person to be pointing a gun at you. “Or else I’m going to shoot you in your stupid mustache. Got it?”

Russ squints at him.

The guy is small, and he looks like just a kid himself, probably not out of his teens. Russ has done his share of fighting— and more than, probably. There’s a chance he could take him, especially if he’s as bad with that gun as it looks like he is.

…It isn’t a chance he’s committed to taking just outta spite, though. Not yet, anyway. He frowns at Dan’s girl, over the kid’s shoulder.

“Where’s your dad? Too busy poaching chickens to know his daughter’s running around in the dark at the end of the world?”

Sam Rochester mutters something, down at the porch and not up at him. “What’s that?”

“I said I killed him,” she says, sticking out her chin and shooting him an impressive glare. “He’s dead. I shot him.”

Russ stares at her. Then to his own surprise, he bursts out laughing, so hard he has to grab the door frame to stay upright. “Well shit, why didn’t you say so?” he says. “Come right the fuck in, then!”

——

“Don’t you have stretchers?” Pax says, raising their foot like they’re gonna kick the doctor in the face when Sol's just got him to agree to help. “I don’t let strangers carry me.”

“I assume the gun means I’m not getting paid for this,” the doctor says drily, “and for free you get one trip in. Take it or don’t.”

Pax is still in the car, which means Kent is too, because Pax’s head is still in his lap. And Sol probably can’t carry Pax; and obviously he can’t carry both at the same time.

“Going once,” the doctor says, waiting at the car door with his eyebrows raised. “It’s sure as hell no skin off my nose if you’d rather stay here and lose your fuckin’ arm.”  
Pax squints at him, and then growls and sits up; Kent rushes to help them. “Fine. Help me out of here, then.”

Under different circumstances watching Pax’s angry-cat reluctance to get arranged in Dr. Sheriff’s huge arms would probably be hilarious. As it is Sol let’s them work that shit out for themselves and jogs around to get Kent out of the car. 

Kent is leaning back against the seat with his eyes closed, breathing kind of hard. His face is the color of cottage cheese. Sol hates this so much.

“Hey,” he says quietly, and when Kent doesn’t answer he reaches out and squeezes his shoulder gently. “Hey. Kent, we’re here, we’re gonna get you looked at.”

Kent’s eyes drift open slowly, and focus on Sol’s face even more slowly. “‘sss… Pax okay?” he mumbles.

“They’ll be fine,” Sol says. “C’mon.” And he tucks an arm under Kent’s knees and the other behind his back and eases him up into a princess carry.

“God,” Sol says quietly. “After this I’m gonna feed you a million hamburgers, dude, you are way too light.” 

Kent’s eyelids flutter, and he rests his head against Sol’s chest. “Not hungry,” he mutters in a pouty voice. Then he sighs, long and dramatic. “This is… you shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t what, man?” Sol says, making his way around the car back up toward the house.

Kent sighs again, sounding distressed, and raises a hand to his forehead to poke at his face-scar. “Shouldn’t— like me. You should— stop. Stop it.”

Sol looks down at his face. He looks genuinely distressed. Sol can see him working himself up. “Hey,” he says. “I get to pick who I like, C.K. I’m a grown man.”

Kent shakes his head, his breathing speeding up. “No. No. You don’t— you don’t know what I really—”

Kent’s chest hitches slightly. His eyes go very wide.

Sol freezes. “Kent?” he says. Kent stares straight ahead. His chest is making tiny juddering movements but Sol can’t hear him actually breathing. “Kent—Baby, what’s—”

Kent grabs for the front of Sol’s shirt, his eyes wide and scared. “Can’t—” he gasps sharply. “Sol—I—can’t—” And he cuts off, making terrible short gasps, his whole body spasming with them.

 _“Fuck,”_ Sol says and then he’s running to catch up with Dr. Sheriff. “Doc— _Doc! Something bad is happening!”_

The doctor turns, and he and Pax both give Sol a look that is annoyed for about a half a second before it shifts into alarm.

“Put me down,” Pax says. “I can stand.”

“Shit. Rochester.” Dr. Sheriff half-dumps Pax back on their feet, where they stand for about a second before they sink down on their knees; the Dr. grabs Sam’s arm when she appears at his side. “There’s a med supply kit on my desk, right of the door. Get it now.” Then, to Sol: “Put him down here. Careful.”

Sol’s never been more careful in his life.

Kent writhes on the grass, his spine arching with the effort of trying to get air in his lungs. In the porch lights Sol can see that his lips are tinted blue.

“What’s _happening?”_ Sol yells, and the doctor doesn’t say anything, just lowers his head to Kent’s chest and listens, face unreadable. He sits back up, sighing.

“Yeah. Fuck. Think his lung’s collapsing.”

Sol feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. “It’s _what?”_

The doctor is saved from responding by Sam’s running footsteps on the porch. Dr. Sheriff holds his hand out behind him and snaps his fingers, and she shoves the big metal box at him and drops to her knees too, panting.

The doctor throws the box open next to him, grabs a stethoscope, sucks in air when he listens to whatever’s wrong inside Kent’s chest. The sound makes Sol very aware of the air Kent is not getting; the sounds he’s making are fucking unbearable. 

“Yeah, you’re not gonna love this,” Dr. Sheriff says, though Sol isn’t sure who he’s talking to. Then he nods at Sol, reaching for more stuff in his bag. “Hold him still.”

Sol stares at him, but then he grabs for Kent’s shoulder and pushes it down, leaning down to talk into his ear. 

“Kent,” Sol says, and he thinks, _I never want to have to talk to him like this again._ “Baby, you gotta hold still, okay? We got a doctor, and he’s gonna help you, but you gotta—um—”

Dr. Sheriff is swabbing a place on Kent’s chest below his collarbone, on the bruised and broken side. At least he can see what he’s doing, since Kent’s shirt is currently holding Pax’s shoulder together. The doc pulls a big needle out of his bag and gives Sol a ‘keep doing what you’re doing’ kind of nod.

“Oh, god, okay,” Sol says. He puts his hand in Kent’s hair, tries to massage his scalp like he did before, in the bedroom, when Kent was just panicking instead of _actively dying._ “God, fuck, okay. We’re gonna help you, we’re gonna get you air, but it’s gonna hurt so I need you to just stay still, okay, baby, just stay still and it’ll be—”

Dr. Sheriff jabs the needle into Kent’s chest. Kent jerks against Sol's hands. Dr. Sheriff messes with the needle somehow—there’s a puff and a hiss—and Kent takes a huge gulp of air, collapsing back against the grass.

“Bhhuh, fuck,” Sol says, dropping his head down to Kent’s shoulder. Dr. Sheriff exhales too, sounding shaky now that the emergency is over—for a given value of ‘over’. 

“Okay, come on,” the doc says to Pax, but Pax swats him away.

“I can walk,” they snap, and they scoot closer to Kent, half-crawling on knees and one hand, to kneel next to his head and reach out to touch his forehead.

“Hah. Okay. Good,” they say, quietly. They lean over Kent, who looks up at them with half-lidded eyes, panting. “For the record, sunshine, if you die I got shot for nothing, so keep that in mind.”

Kent looks at them, catching his breath, and then he closes his eyes and nods.

“Get ‘im inside,” Dr. Sheriff says, waving an arm without turning back. “I’ll see what I can do about sewing you idiots back together.”

Sol gathers Kent back up, and brings him in for a second before he stands up, to give himself a chance to catch his own breath, too.


	19. Clinic (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pax gets bandaged, and discovers a kindred spirit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: medical whump, brief unintentional misgendering, referenced minor character death, referenced death of a child.
> 
> This isn’t very long, but it does exist, and the way things are currently going that is a Big Win for ya boy.

By the time they’ve stumbled their way up onto the doctor’s table, Pax is aware of the all-body muscle tension that happens when you’re forcing yourself to remain upright longer than your body thinks you should, but Pax has never cared what their body thinks before and they’re not going to start now.

The old growly-voiced doctor doesn’t react to whatever he sees when he unwraps the bandages from Pax’s arm except a slight deepening of the crease between his wild and bushy eyebrows. Pax would give a lot to take a tweezer to those things right now; they’re awful and also it would be a phenomenal distraction from how badly pear-shaped this whole adventure is going on every level from physical to emotional.

Sol is in the waiting room (if that’s what they’re calling the kitschily-furnished den at the front of this “clinic”) with the muttering husk of Kent Graves, which Pax is kind of grateful for at the moment; but The Girl Who Shot Them is in here with Pax and Doctor Eyebrows, watching and chewing her already-hideously-peeling lower lip and hugging her elbows like it’s freezing in here. Which it is, for the record, but Pax is pretty sure that’s just blood loss on their end.

“Wanna tell me what happened?” Doctor Eyebrows says gruffly while he wets a swab with disinfectant and Pax prepares themself for the burn. “Your arm looks like raw hamburger. This ain’t a surgery, for fuck’s sake.”

“You can ask your friend here about that,” Pax says sweetly, and Shotgun Sammy or whoever bites her lip harder and looks at the floor.

Doctor Eyebrows looks at her over his shoulder, and then turns back to Pax’s arm, shaking his head. “She’s her father’s daughter,” he mutters darkly. “This’ll hurt.”

He presses the cold burning cotton swab against the deep graze on Pax’s shoulder. For the record Pax is fairly sure it looks worse than it is, but the freezing burn of the alcohol does rocket up and down their arm with the worst spike of pain since the initial shot, and they squeeze one eye shut and bite the inside of their cheek hard.

“I bandaged it, too,” Shotgun Sam says, though it’s unclear who she’s defending herself against exactly. Pax laughs, one harsh caw that takes a little effort but does make her flush deeply and look away, which makes them feel a bit better already.

“Sure,” they say easily, grinning at her with all their teeth. “Everybody knows you can’t get mad at someone for shooting you if they cover it up afterward. Hear that, Doc? You—” They break off with a hiss when the doctor stops patting and starts actually swabbing. “Christ, you wanna jam that in there a little harder, Eyebrows? I think there might still be some muscle underneath for you to scrape out.”

The doc doesn’t stop, but he does raise one of the titular caterpillars and his mustache twitches a little. “Might as well call me Russ, Mister; I figure once a man puts a gun in your face you might as well be on first name terms, huh?”

“Hey, I haven’t touched the thing,” Pax points out, gesturing vaguely at Sam to indicate the concept of the shotgun. “Call me ‘mister’ again and I’ll think about it, though, _Russ.”_

The Doctor’s eyes move to Pax’s face for just a second, and Pax gets ready, but he just shrugs, not pausing in the process of rubbing rough fabric against Pax’s fucking bones or whatever. “Fair enough,” he says, and gets to business with the bandages. “Well, you want the good news, or the bad news?”

Pax narrows their eyes at him. “Bad news first is objectively the right answer.”

“If you say so. Bad news is, the best I can do for this is wrap it, and if you use that arm in the next week, it’s gonna tear you right back open again.”

Pax stares at him. This is. About what they were expecting, obviously. But it is very bad news. “What’s the good news?”

The doctor spreads his hands. “The good news is you get to keep the arm. Probably. Can you move it?”

Pax tries; it hurts like fire and they taste blood in their mouth from instinctively chomping down on their cheek to keep from yelling. They nod curtly. 

“Good. Put your hand on your head and keep it there till I get back. Make sure it’s done bleeding. If those bandages aren’t any redder by the time I’m back you can get the hell out of my clinic.” The doc turns to look at Shotgun Sam. “Come get me if—” 

The doctor pauses, and turns to his eyebrows questioningly at Pax, who takes a second to understand, has to shake their head to clear it before they can talk. “They,” they supply, putting their hand on their head and closing their eyes.

“—if they fall over.”

“Okay,” Sam says quietly, and Pax listens to the doctor’s boots stomp around them and out the door; they breathe in through their nose and out through their mouth and keep their hand on their head, resisting the urge to clench it into a fist, which will definitely hurt worse.

There’s a moment when the only sound is the buzzing of the fluorescent lights, but of course it can’t last.

“Sorry,” Shotgun Sam says in a small voice. When Pax doesn’t answer she adds, “For shooting you,” like they might be confused about what she’s apologizing for.

Pax sighs and cracks their good eye open. She’s looking back at them, which they will actually give her credit for. She’s not fidgeting and looking away. She looks like she’s ready to accept consequences, not that Pax is really in a position to be enforcing any.

Pax holds her gaze for a second. Then they sigh and shrug their undamaged shoulder. “It was an understandable impulse,” they allow. “I’d probably have done the same thing, but I’m a lousy shot. No depth perception.”

Sam breathes in shakily, and Pax can feel the immediate change in the air between them and knows immediately what they’re both thinking. Pax lets her bring it up. There isn’t a lot else they can give her.

“You killed Leah,” Sam says finally, and Pax returns the favor and holds her gaze. They nod once. She’s perched awkwardly on one of the antiseptic-smelling counters, a casual position out of step with the tension in her shoulders and jaw and small clenched fists. “How?”

There’s no good answer, but if Pax knows anything it’s that there’s no rhyme or reason to what you want to know and what you don’t when it comes to grief. Their answer is short and flat and true. “Took her head off. Used a sword. I’m trained; it was as quick as I could make it.”

Her hands are shaking now, and then her lower lip is too. She doesn’t break eye contact with Pax when she starts to cry, and Pax doesn’t either. There’s nothing they can give her, but they don’t look away.


	20. Clinic 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kent wakes up. Sol speaks softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: self-hate, past self-harm (or at least attempting to self-harm by getting sick on purpose); implied past neglect/abuse; over-apologizing; guilt; trauma-induced low self worth.
> 
> As is the Prime Whump Experience: this was very fun to write and also I made myself sad

This is a secret Kent doesn’t ever plan to tell, but as a kid he sort of loved getting sick. 

It was no good to just feel bad with no outward proof something was wrong, obviously, but when there was something measurable, like puking or a fever— even when Chase was in high school and generally too busy to bother with Kent, he’d drop everything to fuss over him. No matter how awful he was feeling—and it was better to be feeling _really_ awful, so he knew he’d earned the time in bed and didn’t have to feel guilty about it—it was worth it to have Chase stay in his room, check his fever with a gentle hand on his forehead, read to him, sometimes, even when he was more than old enough not to need it. Once when Kent was in middle school his fever was high enough and lasted long enough to send him to the hospital, and Chase was almost frantic with worry, and— this is awful, by the way, this is an awful thing to think— Kent _loved_ it, it was worth the terrible dry heat and the rib-cracking cough and the IV needles. He sometimes stayed out late on cold and rainy nights in the hopes it might happen again, halfway between hope for earning that love again and half deeply ashamed for being so manipulative, but it turned out to be a moot point anyway; Kent is now perfectly aware that colds come from viruses and not from wet feet like his mother used to claim.

All that to say, the feeling of waking up with a fever that has just broken— exhausted and sweaty and worn-thin, but blessedly clear-headed— is very familiar, but of course Chase is not here, wherever “here” is. It was different to trick Chase into taking care of him; Chase was his brother, but _here… _Kent doesn’t remember very much except that he is fairly sure he’s embarrassed himself rather badly.__

__Kent is wrapped in a thick scratchy blanket that is now tangled around his legs and absolutely disgusting with sweat. He pulls at it, though it’s difficult to extricate himself because he’s stretched out on a couch that is about a foot too short for him. He sits up to attempt to free his feet, beginning to be frustrated, and then he stops, because he sees that Sol is in an easy chair next to him, fast asleep sitting up with his cheek resting on his hand._ _

__There’s a new brace on Sol’s opposite wrist, which looks less swollen than Kent remembers it, and Kent has a memory, mixed in with all the feverish nonsense floating around in his head, of Sol leaning over him, voice fast and desperate, with tears in his dark eyes._ _

__Kent flops back onto the couch to look up at the ceiling, feeling his cheeks heat up with a miserable blush._ _

__He doesn’t—Obviously, it doesn’t matter what Sol thinks of him. In the long term, it’s much _better_ for Sol to know what a—what an embarrassing crybaby he is; that might be the least painful thing for Sol to know about him. And it’s—silly, and _vain,_ is what it is, to be worried about looking stupid in front of a cute boy during the end of the world._ _

__Kent closes his eyes, and starts to heave a sigh that turns into a hard, chest-wracking cough, which feels like getting kicked in the stomach, hurts so much he doesn’t even worry about the noise he’s making until he hears Sol scrambling up out of his chair and feels Sol’s hand warm between his shoulder blades. Sol lays the other hand on Kent’s chest with gentleness that makes Kent’s eyes tear up even more than the stabbing pain in his ribs was already doing, and braces him against the force of the cough so it doesn’t tear him apart._ _

__It takes him a long moment to catch his breath, and by the time he’s finished coughing all the dull aches he woke up with are so much sharper he can’t actually see while Sol eases him back against the couch pillows, let alone speak._ _

__“Sorry,” he manages finally, though pushing the air out feels like needles in his lungs. “Didn’t mean—to wake you up.”_ _

__For some reason that makes Sol sigh heavily, and when Kent’s vision clears Sol’s handsome face is creased with a troubled frown._ _

__Kent has a vague, foggy memory of Sol telling him not to apologize. “Sorry,” he says immediately, and then winces, both because his breaths feel like knife wounds and also because every second he spends with Sol is more embarrassing than the one preceding it._ _

__“It’s okay,” Sol says, and he puts his warm hand on Kent’s sweaty forehead and slides it softly over his stringy, greasy hair. It would feel wonderful if Kent could think of anything but how disgusting he currently is. “How ya feelin’?”_ _

__“Better,” Kent croaks. “I’m— I think I’m okay, now, actually.” He tries on a smile, but it feels wobbly even from the inside._ _

__Sol’s frown deepens from “sad” into “actively upset,” because Kent is so, so terrible at this._ _

__“Kent,” Sol says, “you’re not ‘okay,’ man. You have pneumonia. Your fucking _lung collapsed.”__ _

__That— doesn’t seem like it can possibly be right. Kent tries to sit up, coughs again, falls back against the couch cushions because it feels like getting stabbed. “I don’t—” He shakes his head helplessly, and Sol is looking more worried by the second, and this is torture. “Sorry, I don’t really—” He can’t finish; it seems like every third breath sucks on the unpleasant heavy fullness he’s realizing he can feel in his lungs and he has to stop and cough again. “Sorry—”_ _

__“Please stop that,” Sol says in a small voice, and Kent stares at him, because he looks so _sad,_ Sol is clearly feeling terrible and Kent doesn’t know how to tell him that he’s feeling it for no _reason._ “Don’t— God.” Sol runs free hand through his hair, the other still resting warm on the top of Kent’s head. “I have— I have about a million questions for you, but I’m not gonna push it when your lungs are all fucked up. So just— how ‘bout you don’t say ‘sorry’ until you can _breathe_ again, huh?” He laughs, a little, and Kent realizes with an even bigger stab of guilt that Sol’s eyes are shining with unshed tears._ _

__Then he realizes that Sol has threatened to ask him questions, and he panics so immediately he almost forgets to feel guilty for a few seconds._ _

__“Woah,” Sol says, alarmed, and puts his hand much too gently on Kent’s chest, where Kent can feel his own heart hammering desperately against his ribs. “Relax— Kent, breathe, okay? I’m not mad at you.”_ _

__“You— _should_ —be—” Kent manages, and Sol’s eyes flash; his hand tightens into a fist on Kent’s shirt and pushes him down— Kent hadn’t even realized he was trying to sit up._ _

___“Shut up,”_ Sol says, dark eyes blazing. _“Breathe. Slowly._ Like you told the little girl. Breathe in.”_ _

__Kent, transfixed, does._ _

__“Hold it.” The breath burns and bubbles in Kent’s protesting lungs, but he does what he’s told. “Now let it out, slow. That’s good.” Sol’s face softens when Kent lets out the breath, and takes another without having to be told, feeling his heart begin to slow already. He strokes Kent’s hair, gentle in a way that makes Kent’s stomach hurt. “That’s great. Thank you.” Sol sighs, closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again and looks at Kent, his eyes warm in a way that burns but is impossible to look away from._ _

__“Quit telling me how you want me to feel,” Sol says, voice soft but firm. “For now, keep breathing until morning, or I really will get mad at you. Understand?”_ _

__The adrenaline from his twenty seconds of panic is running out and Kent is already exhausted again, feels sleep beginning to close over his head like black water. With a supreme effort, he nods at Sol._ _

__“Good,” Sol says, his hand warm in Kent’s filthy hair, and in the last few seconds before he falls asleep, Kent lets the praise wash over him. He’ll find some way to pay for it in the morning, so for a few moments now he lets it feel good._ _


End file.
